The 10th collection from Hirsh, published 40 years after his first, has a very somber tone. It almost feels like a goodbye - half of the poems are about his friends dying (including Philip Levine, William Meredith and Mark Strand - his peers and friends in his craft), the other half are a walk down memory line to past times and past people and sometimes even past places.

The somber tone never really changes but some of the memory poems have a lighter tone - there is some lifting of the clouds. But the sun never really shows up - the overarching images are the ones of cemeteries and funerals, of loss and sorrow.

To all that is added the very personal loss of Hirsh - he started losing his eyesight. A set of poems towards the end of the book deals with that and they are as heart-breaking as anything else in this collection.

For a slim collection, it was a hard work reading it. The poems were sometimes too forceful and the darkness kept coming. Even the lighter ones had enough darkness in them to add to the overall gloominess. The collection makes you think of death and loss - and that is not always a comfortable feeling.

I've read a few of those poems before in various magazines and journals. They are dark but they almost seem to contain a ray of hope on their own. Assembled into a collection, read in the order selected by the author (and the editors), feeding each other, that hope is lost and it is all about the darkness in all its forms. And even the ones that do not work on their own for me add to the overall feeling.

And it is the very last poem that hits the hardest. On its face it is one of the lighter ones. But when a collection full of elegies ends with one called "Don't write elegies", it makes you pause. It is almost a denial of the whole collection. And at the same time it is also a closing chapter - all the elegies are now written, it is someone else's turn to write and mourn, it is time to move on. ( )