“For you, I know I’d even try to turn the tide.”
— Johnny Cash
Wu Wei Eats an Egg, the new poetry collection by Lucas Hirsch, has just been released in New York by Ben Yehuda Press. It is translated from the Dutch by Donna Spruijt-Metz in collaboration with Caecilia de Hoog.
Translation of poetry is always a challenge, but also a gift. Here, the collaboration between poet and translators lets us experience Hirsch’s voice with vivid immediacy—an experience that feels both intimate and expansive. Lucas Hirsch is a poet known for striking imagery and sound; his work strikes a rare balance between emotion and thought, between visionary resonance and lived memory—fusing recollection with premonition—and is not only profound but also innovative. That’s how poetry works, especially in today’s world, where we all face a crisis of meaning.
This book demonstrates Hirsch’s masterful command of both narration and form, and also gently reminds us what poetry is still capable of doing even in translation.
Lucas’s works always explore the familial history, the poet’s fate, and his place in the world, where the deeply personal stories are entwined with socio-spiritual realms; they are expressionistic and even more socially engaged with the narration itself.
What always was, is, and will be
cracks an egg
on the edge
of a frying pan
Acts according to the nature
of the beast
It makes breakfast, the cosmos, and planets
the tumbling sun
It laughs at all there is
It eats an egg under the heavens.
The verses feel like some fusion of memories, sounds, emotions, smells, symbols and visions, and represent the virtuosic combination of the American and Western European traditions of storytelling, somehow getting closer to Franz Wright and his father, James Wright, both the Pulitzer Prize winners for poetry, but here is the thing—it is difficult to name a single poet as the closest stylistic match to Wright’s, especially with Franz, because his works combine elements from several different schools. However, Lucas Hirsch can be considered a poet from the confessional tradition, sharing significant stylistic parallels but holding his own strong poetic voice, which distinguishes him from others.
Hirsch’s style draws on several elements: fragmented language, spiritual quest, and confessional intensity.
His voice is intimate, confronting the emptiness and darkness, often using hushed, simple, and sometimes fragmented language. This stripped-down style reflects a sense of human fragility and atomization. This is the fragmented language.
Like other confessional poets, Hirsch writes with an intense focus on personal experience, suffering, and spirituality. This is the confessional intensity.
His work is infused with a searching, often mystical spirituality, exploring themes of everyday living and faith, seeing things as they are and suffering, and even redemption. He gets pretty close with spiritual questions with primal sincerity, and this is the spiritual quest.
The primitively programmed man
the go-between of civilization
Soul adrift between World Market Buddhas
bits and bytes. Drowning in digital data
deus and Dali, gasping for breath
Throws a fit when a child cries
Beats the parents over the head
with the same ease. It reads pamphlets
like a weather vane in a storm.
There is a palpable poetic connection in Hirsch’s work with the hypnotizing promise of pop culture that extends beyond its influence in the 21st century. It is an excellent match for the similar spiritual intensity and simple but honest verbal expression, when we are facing the killer power of love, some sort of religious mysticism, and the direct speech of contemporary man who challenges himself to see the world as it is.
It is a work of searching religious mysticism in self-observing meditation and everyday living, when a poet who is unafraid to explore powerful spiritual themes in a secular age, with unabashed spirituality, also shares a powerful and unambiguous concept that defines much of his work.
That is why the confessional poetic visions are so strongly connected with the realistic atmosphere in the book. As a prominent figure in the confessional poetry and its tradition, Hirsch has stylistic ties to his time, at the political, socio-economic, and emotional levels. Autobiographical verses laid the groundwork for poets like him, whose work has been compared to Wright, or even Rainer Maria Rilke and William Carlos Williams, showing a deep affinity for the lyrical and philosophical sensibility and mostly for its sparse, imagistic, and metaphysical nature, but once again, Hirsch sounds different; his work has a different nature of perception than the classics. There’s a mix of narration and imagery, there are symbols of pop culture in Lucas’ verses, and intellectual depths of monolith literature—our compliments to translators Donna Spruijt-Metz and Caecilia de Hoog; they really did an enormous job in their English translation of Lucas Hirsch’s poems.
These poems balance perfectly between the form of expression and the symbolic power of narration. In all honesty, achieving that level of balance is an act of daring.
Like lying in the bathtub for a long time
I feel my skin glide from my structure
like a rubber glove
I live all kinds of lives
but embody nothing
I’m not old, not young
can’t get me to make sense
I know that those who have time
surrender too much to thinking
counting wrinkles
will wear them down
to the bone.
We may ask why the book has a title like this. OK, take a close look at the text, read it, and figure it out. It reveals itself.
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