The book had a great collection of poems, the critical analysis was very well done. But together they did not work for me. My expectation was a set of poems with an introduction of the type of heartbreak and then the poem itself.

When I ask for this book, I thought it will be 100 new poems and I found yes poems but with a story of why they are so sad and don't get me wrong it's interesting but not not what I been looking for

An insightful and deeply researched book. I had expected that the book would be just the poems. Instead, the book is an analysis of the poems. Very thoughtful.

I really liked the explanation for these poems, it made me appreciate them more, sadly the formatting of the book was a mess on my Kindle, so to begin with I felt it messed with the way the poems were written, especially since the author talks about closed lines and run on lines in the first poem (I realised I could look for the capital letters and hope that meant a new line had started, but it did spoil my reading a bit. Thoroughly enjoyed learning more about poems though!

I have been reading poetry for nearly 30 years since being a teenager. I’m a huge fan of poetry and its power to soothe you when heartbroken, however, this isn’t the book to do this.

The poetry choices aren’t great - how a collection about heartbreak doesn’t include ‘The joys that sting’ by CS Lewis is dumbfounding. Personally, it’s the most beautiful poem ever written about grief.

I’m also not sure who this book is aimed at as the only people who would want to dissect a poems meter, techniques and historical context would surely only be students. I don’t want to read an a English essay to help me in my grief. More poems and brief paragraphs or even personal anecdotes may have made this more ‘human’.

I’m also fairly certain, most, if not all, the poets are white when there’s such a beautiful catalogue of phenomenal BAME poets. How can Maya Angelou not have a poem here with some of her beautiful writing on heartbreak or the superb Lemn Sissay from England/Ethiopia.

If I’m clutching at straws there’s a lot here if you’re studying poetry and a history that chooses a poem from each year. I just wouldn’t recommend this if you are grief stricken or broken hearted.

"We live in distracting times," writes one of the most popular poets in our modern era. In the midst of widespread superficiality, we need a more down-to-earth reality. Driven by an overwhelming rush for success, we often do not spend time licking our wounds of failure, reflecting on setbacks, or grieving over losses. Busyness could be a convenient coverup for emotional weakness or vulnerability. The difference between prose and poetry is quite well-known. Prose tends to be relatively direct while poetry requires time to digest. It also takes on a more pragmatic mode rather than imaginative; information-driven vs experience-led; utilitarian vs expressiveness; and so on. Poetry on the other hand gives one the freedom to express our feelings that allows us to use a variety of literary art such as art, music, or various methods of illumination. There is more freedom of expression, something that adequately sways with the feelings of the poet. Poet Edward Hirsch gives us a powerful collection of poems from various contributors, both past and present. He writes this book of poems as a way to invite us into a world of how many people have expressed their hurts, pains, and struggles. People from the past such as William Wordsworth who mourns his daughter's death with a poem "Surprised by Joy" or Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam" that describes his distress over the passing of a dear friend. People in the present such as Mary Oliver who mourns the loss of loons due to lead poisoning in New England where her poem "Lead" laments the failure to protect the environment we live in. Anne Sexton's "Wanting to Die" is a counsel for a friend wanting to commit suicide. Muriel Rukeyser's "Poem" is an anti-war cry. Anya Krogovoy Silver's "Persimmon" is a mindful meandering over fruit in the midst of cancer. Michael Collier's "An Individual History" expresses the struggles and pain of seeing one's grandmother going through a potpourri of medication and drug side-effects. Philip Schultz's "Failure" expresses a humiliating situation where one needs to borrow money from his father's debtor to pay for his father's funeral.

There are poems of faith from different walks of life, expressed in many different people groups. Sadness over death, environmental disasters, famine, mortality, sicknesses, wars, unrequited love, and many more. The range of human emotions is truly astounding. Hirsch writes as a gentle guide, explaining how the poems' twists and turns in a clear way that brings up the essence of the most deeply held emotions by the poet. Without Hirsch's explanations, I would have missed out a significant chunk of the poetry's meaning. The chapters are arranged mostly chronologically based on the time the poem was written.

My Thoughts
==============
This book requires time to digest. It is best to read one chapter at a time, though one could start any chapter. It is important to read the Introduction to get a map of what the book is about. It also shows readers how the author intends to do with the rest of the book. I would suggest staying with Hirsch at least in the first five or ten chapters so that one gets a hang of Hirsch's framework. Having done that, feel free to reference any chapter at any time. Read and re-read.

The title of the book is intriguing, and that was one of the first reasons why I was attracted to this book. Wow. Is there any way to break the heart of even the most stoic minds or stern hearts? If there is, I sure would like to know or read about it. If the title had drawn me to the book, the poems drew me even deeper into the heart of the poems. When one sees the raw emotions expressed by the poet, there is a good chance that one's heart would break. The 100 poems selected would affect us in different ways, some more others less. Given the scope of coverage, there will be at least one that would touch our heart, if not break it. Regardless of gender, race, religion, or people groups, this book speaks to our common shared humanity, that we are all human, that we all live in a broken world, that we are all crying out for comfort, peace, and understanding. If any part of the book could nudge any of these closer to our hearts, it would have worth every cent.

EDWARD HIRSCH is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. A MacArthur fellow, he has published ten books of poems and six books of prose. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.

Rating: 4.5 stars of 5.

conrade
This book has been provided courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.

Reading the title of this book, I was really excited because I do love collections of poetry. Personally, I feel reading poetry is incredibly subjective so there is no guarantee that you'll love any of the poems found within this collection. However, I will say that this collection was amazing with its breadth of different times and voices represented.

I was not expecting an in-depth analysis of each work. I had been missing my discussions that we had in my various college literature courses and that was very reminiscent of the breakdown that we would have. If that's what you're into then absolutely go for it and pick this up. But it also makes for some really dense reading and it's sort of a niche topic that not every reader is going to want to pick up.

I got what I wanted out of it, I found some new poems that I really connect with. Other than that, I don't have any strong feelings either way for this book.

“In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.”
— Stanley Kunitz, ‘The Testing-Tree’

“Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering — not just our own suffering but also the suffering of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a verbal record. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art.”

This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief.

Hirsch has chosen poems from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. He creates a dramatic, sometimes biographical, often historical context for the poems, explaining their references, teasing out their meanings, unpacking them.

The anthology includes sonnets and sestinas, aubades and elegies, an ecologue, a villanelle, a blues poem, a night song or nocturne, a pantoum, prose poems, lyrics that rhyme and lyrics that don’t, intentional and unintentional fragments, poems pitched at the level of speech, others that sing. There are prayers and anti-prayers.

There is always something untranslatable about a poem, but Hirsch has included a wide range of poems that have been translated into English from many different languages, poems from Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic.

Poems are written in solitude, but they reach out to others, which makes poetry a social act. It rises out of one solitude to meet another. Poems of terrible sadness and loss trouble and challenge us, but they also make us feel less alone and more connected. Our own desolations become more recognizable to us, more articulate, something shared. We become less isolated in our sorrow, and thus are befriended by the words of another. There is something ennobling in grief that is compacted, expressed, and transfigured into poetry.

Grief isn’t denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems.

No one escapes unscathed — we all have our hearts broken. and yet, as Czelaw Milosz puts it in his ‘Elegy for N.N’, “the heart does not die when one thinks it should”. Despite everything, we go on.

These poems don’t offer easy answers to grief, they keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in her poem ‘Train Ride’, “All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever”.

Among some of my favourite poets included: are Naomi Shihab Nye; Louise Gluck; Sharon Olds; Joy Harjo; Adrienne Rich; Les Murray; Marie Howe; Stanley Kunitz; Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Lucille Clifton; Eavan Boland; Galway Kinnell; Mary Oliver; Natasha Trethewey; Tony Hoagland; Michael Waters; Lucie Brock-Broido; Yusuf Komunyakaa, and Victoria Chang.

A huge thank you to @NetGalley and @Houghton_Mifflin for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I just could not get into this, so I had to put it down. I evidently missed the part about the author breaking down the poems for us in laymen’s terms and although I was open to it when I realized that’s what this collection was, I didn’t enjoy the execution. It was a little too wordy for me and I was just hoping for a compilation of new and old poems for me to enjoy all in one collection. I would be open to maybe reading this another time!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The background on the life of the poet and personal details behind the poems make them even more heartbreaking and vivid. For each poet to be and a history buff a lovely read.

Some of the many poets whose works are included in this collection are Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Randall Jarrell, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, Sharon Olds and Phillip Larkin, among many others. This is certainly a good collection with, as the title suggests, a focus on heartbreak. What a topic for Covid times, although there are many kinds of losses and many centuries during which poets grappled with this emotion. Grief does not only belong to today.

This collection will most appeal to serious readers of poetry. There are many kinds of poems including sonnets, aubades, a villanelle, a nocturne and more. The erudite editor has selected poems that have special meaning to him and he explicates them all. Some readers may not want all of this additional content but it is worth looking at, at least some of the time. Other times, readers can dip in and read whatever poem they like on its own merits. Readers who take their time with this title will learn a lot and feel a good deal as well.

I am really disappointed in this book of poetry. The layout was poor and made it difficult to find the poems. They were buried in a wall of text instead of being the highlight and easy to find. Maybe this will be corrected in the final proof?

I'm a newbie to reading poetry. While I appreciated the level of detail in the dissection and analysis, it felt like a college textbook. I feel most readers are like me in that they are either new to poetry or casual readers. This level of detail was unnecessary.

I'd suggest this to readers who are advanced poetry readers that want to really understand the context and analysis of the poems. As a new casual reader, this just wasn't for me.

Like any poetry collection, there are some hits and some misses here - but overall, this is a well-put-together collection with a promising premise. My biggest dislike about this particular collection is that it leans too heavily to male poets for me. Of course, given that the editor is a man, I'm not sure that's a surprise.

There are better collections, but this one isn't a total loss.

Bem, não foi exatamente isso que eu esperava quando me deparei com esse livro.
É um bom livro para quem gosta e busca análises de poemas, porém eu não queria isso e acabei me decepcionando.
Uma coisa que me incomodou foi que a análise e o poema em si ficavam meio misturados entre parágrafos, poderia ser uma coisa e depois outra.
A capa é simplesmente maravilhosa, mas infelizmente esse livro não era pra mim.

This was not what I expected it to be. I expected 100 poems with short bios of each author, but what this book is instead is a detailed analysis of the poems and the poets. While there were some aspects of the author's analysis I enjoyed, most of the time I found it to be superfluous. For certain poems, his analysis was so detailed that he would examine the poem almost line by line, and I found myself skipping some parts so that I could get to the next poem. Sometimes I felt as if the author was meticulously dissecting the poetry with a scalpel and then using the technical terms to describe it's anatomy instead of showcasing the feelings and emotions of the poems.



Thank you to Netgalley + Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sending me an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

deciding to DNF this one at bout 40 percent. I just felt like I wasn't really getting anything out of these poems and was getting quite bored which is not ideal.

This anthology is a charming collection of poems centred around loss, death, grief, sadness and fear. Each poem is accompanied by a detailed analysis and the context in which it was written.

Edward Hirsch does a wonderful job in explaining the poems, but the analysis often overpowers the poem. It is often too unnecessarily detailed. The book goes from being a light read to an educational one, which is fine if that’s what you want although I would have preferred shorter insights.
The selection of poems is quite good though.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

A beautiful book by a beautiful and celebrated poet. I love poetry, and I find as I get older, I look to poetry more and more often to understand my world and to express those thoughts and feelings that are percolating but not quite polished or defined. Edward Hirsch curated a poignant collection of 100 poems on grief, loss, loneliness, fear, suffering...heartbreak. His collection draws from 200 years of poetry, from classic poets to modern authors. Some poems were familiar, and some were new for me. What makes this stand out is the way Hirsch unpacks each poem, explaining meaning and references, teaching the reader so you can more fully experience each poem. I know this is a book I will purchase for myself, to reference when needed, and to gift to a friend or family member. This grateful reader appreciates the ARC from NetGalley!

I started this book, and in the beginning, it felt strange, and I kept hoping that once we're done with the introductions and what the author thinks about the poems, the poems would be presented. That, sadly was not the case. Perhaps this is on me for not combing through the description more thoroughly than I did, but this book is about what the author feels about the poems he mentions as the 100 poems, and not the poems themselves. Also, they don't feel like they're on heartbreak? Just saying.

I really wanted to like this, I loved the premise but the layout meant I struggled. I think I would have preferred the poem first then the analogy as the layout made it hard to read.

I also found a lot of the poems to not be heartbreaking or about love but very religious and they felt dated which was a shame.

I liked that there were lots of female writers showcased and enjoyed that aspect.

Thank you for the arc.