Synopses & Reviews
The fourth volume of the San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, All That’s Left is a powerful collection of poems for social justice by street-poet-turned- laureate Jack Hirschman. The volume opens with Hirschman’s autobiographical inaugural address, which vividly traces his career as poet, translator, and agitator.
Included are several of Hirschman’s earlier poems, marking successive stages of his poetic development. The poems following the address were composed during his tenure as poet laureate, covering contemporary outrages like post-Katrina New Orleans and the Virginia Tech tragedy, paying homage to fallen poetic comrades like Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman, and exploring more personal dimensions of love.
Review
"In Jack Hirschman's All That's Left, a book that commemorates his appointment as San Francisco 'Poet Laureate,' we see a personification of [the] two sides of San Francisco poetry—the impulse to change the world through social protest poetry, and the Beat impulse to view the world more personally and also on a spiritual plane . . . . A lovely homage to a recently deceased street poet . . . [is] witty and supple and personal and beatific . . . . [In title poem 'All That's Left,' his] calm lines balance out the political rhetoric of earlier poems and suggest a wise self-knowledge hard-won by an admirable man who has spent his life laboring on the right side of dozens of causes." American Book Review
Synopsis
Poems for social justice by San Francisco's poet laureate, including his autobiographical inaugural address.
About the Author
Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator, and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. Since leaving a teaching career in the '60s, Hirschman has taken the free exchange of poetry and politics into the streets where he is, in the words of poet Luke Breit, "America's most important living poet." He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some 45 translations from a half a dozen languages, as well as the editor of anthologies and journals.