Stranger by Night: Poems

Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him

Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy.

He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn...