Jane Hirshfield's poetry delves into the profound connection between the external world and the inner life. Her verses are marked by a keen observation of detail and an ability to uncover unexpected connections within everyday reality. Through her language, she brings readers closer to the fragility of existence and the power of mindful perception. Her work serves as an invitation to a deeper experience of the present moment.
This collection features a fresh assortment of poems from an acclaimed author known for their previous work, October Palace. The new volume showcases the author's distinctive voice and lyrical style, exploring themes of nature, emotion, and the human experience. Each poem invites readers to engage deeply with the imagery and sentiments presented, reflecting the author's continued evolution and mastery of the craft.
Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. The Asking supersedes her earlier retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005).
"An exquisite accomplishment. These serene and painterly meditations quietly blossom into luminous and sensual lyric reckonings." — David St. John "A radiant and passionate collection." — New York Times Book Review Grounded in a series of mediations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world, Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain.
Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer with a wide readership. Her urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives' dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees.
This collection showcases the unique and vital voice of a prominent American poet, featuring a series of luminous poems that reflect deep emotional resonance and innovative language. Through a blend of personal and universal themes, the work invites readers to explore the intricacies of human experience, offering insight into both the mundane and the profound. The poet's distinctive style and perspective make this collection a significant contribution to contemporary literature.
A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and popular essayist "Poetry," Jane Hirshfield has said, "is language that foments revolutions of being." In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds some of the ways this is done--by the inclusion of hiddenness, paradox, and surprise; by a perennial awareness of the place of uncertainty in our lives; by language's own acts of discovery; by the powers of image, statement, music, and feeling to enlarge in every direction. Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bashō, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry's world-making takes place: word by charged word. By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible. Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged.
Hirshfield is one of America's leading poets. This is her fourth book from Bloodaxe, following Come, Thief (2012), T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted After (2006) and Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (2005).
New collection by leading American poet whose last book, After (2006), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Examines the roles of hiddenness, uncertainty and surprise as they appear in poetry and other works of literature, in the life and psyche of the writer, and in the broader life of the culture as a whole.
Features poems that reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. This work examines the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgement and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, meanings in overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing.