Edward Hirsch's For the Sleepwalkers is [a] surprising first book—surprising not just for its quality but for its literary sophistication as well. Hirsch's poems fall into that vague, hard to define category of the post-modern; he has read the American surrealists, he has learned from John Ashbery. Poets in this tradition generally value technique at least as much as they do content, a fact evident just in the large amount of verbal experimentation they engage in. As Ashbery did as a young writer, Hirsch here tries his hand against the rigorous limitations of such forms as the sestina. (All poets do this kind of thing now and then, but the technical play involved is important enough to the likes of Ashbery and Hirsch that they print the results.) The immediate payoff from this experimentation is a tightness of imagery in many of Hirsch's poems; that is, rather...