[Young] poets who are too careful sometimes dry up. Edward Hirsch is not cautious, and his first book, For the Sleepwalkers …, is uneven. Nevertheless, his failures suggest promise, and at his best he speaks with authority.

The brave opening, "Song Against Natural Selection," proclaims that "The weak survive!"—a sentiment in keeping with Hirsch's willingness to face up to failure. This poem, though happens to be a complete success…. The formal structure, making the reader only belatedly aware of rhyme, complements the wry acceptance of loss.

I suspect that Hirsch is fond of the French "Homage" (those elegies written at somebody's tomb) because of the chance it gives him to indulge his mimetic gifts, not merely out of an admiration of Baudelaire and Verlaine. He is a good imitator, and some of these poems—transposing Lorca to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or Vallejo to a soup...