Wild Gratitude, Hirsch's poetry collection that includes "Omen," was received favorably by critics, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and an award for poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. The prestigious writer Robert Penn Warren commended the book's best poems as unsurpassed in their time. Daniel L. Guillory, in his review of the book for Library Journal, praises Hirsch's poems as offering "poetic surprises on every page. Highly recommended." As Nancy Eimers writes in her Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Hirsch: "Critics comparing it with For the Sleepwalker have generally praised Wild Gratitude for its greater control and maturity of technique and subject matter."

Eimers goes on to cite "Omen" as an example of Hirsch's increased attention to autobiographical material, writing that the poem "is more sparse and direct in its presentation of [personal] details than most of Hirsch's earlier poems." The poem...