... endless forms most beautiful ...: poems by norbert hirschhorn

Norbert Hirschhorn, MD, an "American Health Hero" (President Clinton) who "saved 50 million lives" (BBC) became a poet in his later years, with seven collections of poetry and poems published in numerous journals (bertzpoet.com), most during his public health sojourns in the Middle East and England.

"...endless forms most beautiful..." (Charles Darwin) is his eighth book with which he joins an illustrious group of late-in-life artists, that include Carmen Herrera, Mark Rothko, and Betty Tompkins. He began his poetic odyssey in high school with a bad sonnet but didn't resume until a late-life crisis in his fifties. A Masters of Fine Arts degree later and numerous workshops with eminent poets (Frank Bidart, Lucie Brock-Broido, David Wojahn) followed.

Hirschhorn wanted his final collection to be most beautiful from cover to cover and all the poems within. The poems themselves are prose-poems, a hybrid form combining the structure of prose with elements of poetry first created by the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire.

Hirschhorn has taken the form to a different level: The poems are in alphabetic order by title, and thus by chance allowing them to "speak" to each other, a trait desired by all published poets.

His new book satisfies W.H. Auden's criteria for poetry: "[T]he questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: 'Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?'" The second, according to Auden, is in the broadest sense, moral: "What kind of [poet] inhabits this poem?"

Hirschhorn found the first question congenial to his scientific mind; the second appreciated in top-flight reviews of his work: "His verse reveals a man who is both a humanist and a humorist" (Kirkus Reviews) and "everywhere humane and brotherly in its words and vision" (Marilyn Hacker, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets), but doesn't pull punches when describing his Judaism and the state of the world.