“It’s so red hot, thinking about his life and what he might regard as appropriate for someone else to know,” Hirsch says. Collage by Patrick Bremer.

In October, 1988, my friends Janet Landay and Edward Hirsch flew to New Orleans to adopt a boy who was six days old. He was collected from the hospital by their lawyer, who brought him to the house where they were staying. Waiting for her, they stood in the street in front of the house. For several days, they worried that the mother, overcome by love or by guilt, might want the child back, but she didn’t.

At the time, Hirsch was an associate professor at the University of Houston. He is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, but he is above all a poet. He has published eight books of poems, among them “Earthly Measures,” which Harold Bloom included in “The Western Canon.” Nominated by Robert Penn Warren, Hirsch had won the Rome Prize, which confers a year’s residence at the American Academy there. Travelling from Rome to New Orleans took twenty-three hours, leaving Landay and Hirsch with “jet lag instead of labor,” Hirsch wrote in a journal. Before leaving, they had told the lawyer their son’s name, Gabriel. In the Book of Daniel, Gabriel approaches Daniel “ ‘in swift flight,’ which is how our son came to us,” Hirsch wrote.

Hirsch calls his journal, which was written retrospectively, a dossier. By the time he started it, in the fall of 2011, he and Landay were divorced. He began it as a means of writing down everything he could remember of Gabriel, who died, at twenty-two, on August 27, 2011. The night before, around ten, as Hurricane Irene was arriving in New York, Gabriel told his girlfriend that he was going to meet a friend for a drink near Columbia University. A little after eleven, he sent her a text saying he would be home in an hour. After that, he didn’t answer his phone. Three days later, Landay and Hirsch found themselves speaking to detectives in a police station in Jersey City, New Jersey. An entry on Craigslist had led Gabriel to a party where guests were given a club drug, possibly in a drink. He became violently sick and had a seizure. An ambulance took him to a hospital, where he died, shortly after six in the morning, from cardiac arrest. Gabriel’s life and death are too painful for Landay to discuss, she told me. Furthermore, she feels strongly that they are no one’s business but hers and Hirsch’s.

After Gabriel’s funeral, Hirsch returned to work at the Guggenheim. “I was just wandering around the office, though, unable to concentrate, just staring into space,” he told me recently. “Eddie walked around like a dead man,” André Bernard, the foundation’s vice-president, said. “I’ve never seen anyone look so terrible.” Hirsch is Jewish, but he is not religious. He didn’t feel that he could say Kaddish, the prayer that a mourner recites many times a day for eleven months. The foundation gave him a leave, and he moved to Atlanta, where his partner, a writer named Lauren Watel, lives, and, on the recommendation of a friend who said it might help him grieve if he wrote about Gabriel, he started the dossier. For a few hours a day, writing gave him something to think about other than “just my own sadness,” he said. It also made him feel as if he were in Gabriel’s presence. He would call his mother and his two sisters and hear stories about Gabriel. He spoke with Landay daily. On Gabriel’s birthday, he visited New York and celebrated with Gabriel’s friends and heard stories about him that he had never known. “Slowly, I became stronger,” he said. “I wasn’t healing, but I was stronger.”

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Hirsch spent four months in Atlanta, seeing very few people, and finished the dossier, which is a hundred and twenty-seven pages long. When he came back to New York, his grief was undiminished, except that, with the dossier done, he no longer had any means of managing it. The dossier wasn’t something he felt he could revise and publish; it was a private document and, because it was strictly factual, it was more a catalogue than a memoir. Hirsch sometimes describes himself as a personal poet, by which he means that nearly everyone important to him has appeared in one of his poems. He had written two poems about Gabriel when Gabriel was alive, one when he was adopted and the second when Gabriel was fifteen, but otherwise he hadn’t allowed himself to write about him. “We adopted him, and we were supposed to protect him,” he said. “It didn’t seem like a child was fair game for a writer thge way your parents are.” In New York, though, unable to console himself by any means other than writing, he began a few poems about Gabriel.

“Some of the things he did were so funny, and some of the things were so strange, that I thought, I’ll explore this,” he said. He completed a poem about a night at a fair when he had carried Gabriel on his shoulders so that he could see a fireworks display, and Gabriel said, ambiguously, “Dad, I didn’t come here to watch the fireworks.” He wrote a surreal poem about Gabriel sprawled on top of a bus travelling through a tunnel and leaving the city, as if for the afterlife. “A teenage boy finds himself / Lying facedown on top of a bus / Racing through a tunnel out of the city,” it began. By the time he finished four or five poems, he had grown dissatisfied. A tragedy had befallen him, but the poems seemed more like anecdotes than like poems, and completely inadequate to the weight of the occasion. Furthermore, he didn’t want to write a few poems about Gabriel and have them eventually included in a book among others that had nothing to do with him.

After someone dies, it becomes difficult to remember what he or she looked like. The closer Hirsch came to the end of his memories, while writing the dossier, the more he felt that he was losing his grasp of his son. He realized that, if he were going to write about him meaningfully, the factual tone of the dossier would have to be amended by his feelings. “I decided that what I wrote wasn’t going to be just about Gabriel, it also had to be about losing Gabriel,” he said. Once he started working again, he was plagued by the thought that Gabriel might disapprove of how he was being depicted. “The whole time, I’m desperately trying to be faithful to Gabriel’s life, so that he’ll come through,” Hirsch said. “A person who’s only suffering can’t write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. I’m working, I’m making decisions, but it’s so red hot, thinking about his life and what he might regard as appropriate for someone else to know.”

After eight months, Hirsch had finished a narrative poem that is seventy-five pages long. It is called “Gabriel,” and it will be published in September as a book by Knopf. The poet Eavan Boland described “Gabriel” to me as “a masterpiece of sorrow.” Hirsch’s writing characteristically involves “material that is psychically dangerous,” the poet and critic Richard Howard told me. “His detractors would say that he feels he is someone who must reveal the truth, as opposed to being ironic, and he’s contending here with these forces.” Hirsch felt that for the poem to succeed it could not include any traces of sentimentality, otherwise he would be an unreliable witness. “Gabriel” begins: