A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate, from the internationally renowned poet.Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems in...

The Beauty, an incandescent new collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices, opens with a series of dappled, ranging “My” poems—“My Skeleton,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” “My Weather”—using materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer wor...

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and essayist“Poetry,” Jane Hirshfield has said, “is language that foments revolutions of being.” In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds and explores 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, sta...

The long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here”In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and i...

A revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms.Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into a moment’s essence and exchange something of herself with its finite music—and then, in seemingly simple, inevitable words, to deliver that exchange to us in poems that vibrate with form and expression perfectly united. Hirshfield’s poems of discover...

In this 2023 conversation with Justine Willis Toms, award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield takes us beyond our analytical minds and lands us in an embodied experience. Hirshfield offers that this helps us meet the despair which inevitably rises up in the darkest moments. She adds that poetry can cut windows and doors in your despair and give you a way to walk back into the world with others*.* Against the torrent of data and information that issues from an increasingly polarized and rageful cu...

"Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets." —David Baker, The American Poet"Hirshfield's poems . . . send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness." — Booklist (starred review)A profound, generous, and masterful sixth lyrical collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connect...

The Asking draws together a selection of previously published work along with new poems from one of American poetry’s foremost environmental advocates.A visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human, Jane Hirshfield's poems are both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced...

The long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here”In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and i...

Jane Hirshfield believes that poetry can play a transformative role in our lives. “What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one’s self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove.” She offers her perspective on beauty and how it cannot exist alone. She takes us behind the scenes into the mind of the poet, and treats us to some of he...

Jane Hirshfield points out that many people turn to poetry in times of great life transitions. She says, “You know when people fall in love, or when they lose love, or lose someone they loved, that is when they want a poem. When they get married, they want a poem. These great transitions are larger than the normal, ordinary consciousness. And what poems do is give us a vocabulary for understanding things, which isn’t available through any other use of language.” Her poetry alludes...

In this time of global uncertainty good poems can soften the heart and help us face another day with curiosity, wonder and hope. It gives us another lens to view the world and helps bring what is often unseen into view. Poetry opens us to feel our connection to one another and to nature. It gives us the opportunity to recalibrate our perspective on our place in the world.