“Booked” by Kwame Alexander and “Gabriel” by Edward Hirsch

Poetry is sadly underrepresented in these reviews. I have no confidence in my ability to evaluate poetry, and I must say that I came to an appreciation of poetry very late in my life. But that appreciation has turned into love. So I will review a couple of modern poems which are wildly different and hope, in the process, to encourage you to explore on your own. Poetry can do things that no other kind of literature can and definitely can feed the preaching imagination.

Booked

By Kwame Alexander

2016

320 pages / 2 hours and 26 minutes

Kwame Alexander’s Booked is a poem, I think, although I guess it depends on how you define the term poem. At any rate, it is a novel in verse. You may know Alexander from his frequent appearances on NPR. There is probably no one else in America who does more than Alexander to stoke the poetic sensibilities in us all. Booked is aimed at young adult literature but no worries – you will love it anyway.

Nick Hall is a soccer player but that’s not the most important thing about him. His father is a linguist who has written a dictionary of weird words, some of which Nick is obliged to read every day. Anybody want to take a shot at the word sweven? The book is a coming-of-age story full of unusual words all told in verse. I don’t know how I’m making it sound, but it is pure joy to read.

Gabriel: A Poem

By Edward Hirsch

2014

96 pages

On the other end of the spectrum is Gabriel, a book-length poem by Edward Hirsch. Gabriel is the troubled 22-year-old adopted son of a poet and dies of cardiac arrest after taking drugs at a party. It is hard to imagine any literature other than poetry to express the grief and loss the father feels. While the poem never strays from that very personal loss, it also begins to catalog many literary references to those who have lost children. In that way, the book becomes an education. I encourage you to make a note of the references as you come to them and then look them up later. That in itself is an experience.

The structure is very inflexible. On every page there are 10 three-line stanzas … page after page after page (it is a 75-page poem). Yet there is no punctuation, and one stanza might bleed into another. The words roll over us as we move back and forth between the very personal grief and the broader references to those who have lost a child.

Hirsch is Jewish, though I do not know whether he is secular or religious. Regardless, there is a profound wrestling with God that, as we come to the end of the book, becomes almost unbearable. Near the end, we get these staggering lines:

I will not forgive you
Indifferent God
Until you give me back my son

I am intentionally juxtaposing these two long poems. One tells a story of a boy growing up. One mourns a son who will not grow old. One fills me with joy. One elicits enormous pain. Both show that, when it is done well, there is nothing to compare with powerful verse.