Book Launch: Edward Hirsch presents "A Passing Bell" by Paul Kane

Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation, launches Paul Kane's A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina. 

This collection by Paul Kane about the untimely passing of his wife performs the work of mourning by giving a shape to grief. Utilizing the poetic form of the classic Persian ghazal, A Passing Bell takes its place alongside other modern works on death and consolation, such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.  We are taken through the deep process of grieving, in all its ebb and flow of emotion, its agonizing sorrow and sense of despair, to further stages of acceptance and self-recovery.

Paul Kane is a poet and critic who has published six collections of poems and a dozen other books. He has received a Fulbright award, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation. He is the editor of Poetry of the American Renaissance and the general editor of The Braziller Series of Australian Poets, and is currently Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Vassar College. 

Praise for A Passing Bell:
"a rare and soaring masterpiece” —Alex Miller
“so deep and fine it could and should last forever” —Barry Hill
“his masterwork” —David McCooey

The book launch will feature a reading by Paul Kane, as well as refreshments and copies of the collection for purchase. Please join us by RSVPing to the email listed.