Bøger af Jane Hirshfield

"Hirshfield's current collection brings together . . . an astonishing array of women writers from the 22nd century BC poet Enheduanna to Nelly Sachs and Anna Akhmatova."--Library Journal

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).

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).

"The Asking opens with new and urgent poems by Jane Hirshfield, in which she faces again the contradictions that have shaped her work: "Some take/ in witnessed suffering, pleasure," she writes. "Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty." The volume then returns to the beginning, carrying us from her earliest volumes (including Of Gravity and Angels; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After), up through the important recent work (Come, Thief; The Beauty; Ledger). We find poems of the smallest ant and the vastness of time, of hunger and bounty, of science and war and love in its myriad forms. Whether it is Hirshfield's insistence on the lessons of the natural world-"The lake scarlets / the same instant as the maple. / Let others try to say this is not passion"-or her facing squarely the depredations of climate and the harm to fellow human beings by our own hands; whether she is assessing what language does for us ("Words are loyal. / Whatever they name they take the side of") or interrogating poetry itself as a vibrant, living medium through which her own debt to creation's splendors must be paid, this poet sets our shared truths in black ink. The Asking, in poems of delicacy and ringing clarity, demands our attention to beauty and injustice equally, enlarging our awareness of breakage as well as the posssibility for repair"--

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 discovery, acknowledgment of the difficult, and praise turn always toward deepening comprehension. Here we encounter the stealth of feeling's arrival ("as some strings, untouched, / sound when a near one is speaking. / So it was when love slipped inside us”), an anatomy of solitude ("wrong solitude vinegars the soul, / right solitude oils it”), a reflection on perishability and the sweetness its acceptance invites into our midst ("How suddenly then / the strange happiness took me, / like a man with strong hands and strong mouth”), and a muscular, unblindfolded awareness of our shared political and planetary fate. To read these startlingly true poems is to find our own feelings eloquently ensnared. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each face of our lives its metamorphosing portrait, its particular, memorable, singing and singular name. Love in AugustWhite mothsagainst the screenin August darkness.Some clamor in envy.Some spread largeas two handsof a thiefwho wants to put back in your cupboardthe long-taken silver.

"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 collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. Jane Hirshfield's alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from sparseness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. In respective series of "assays" (meditative imaginative accountings) and "pebbles" (each a "brief, easily pocketable perception that remains incomplete until the reader's own response awakens inside it"), Hirshfield explores a poetry-making that looks simultaneously outward and inward, finding resonant and precise containers for the deepest currents of our inner life.

"Hirshfield's are the kind of poems that could--before you even realize it--have quietly changed your life."--O MagazineIn this luminous and authoritative collection, Jane Hirshfield presents an ever-deepening and altering comprehension of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, death, and of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.

A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. Nine Gates is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world -- alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.In part a primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.

A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace.

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.

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.

Come, Thief centres on the beauty and fragility of our lives, touching on love, science, ageing and mortality, war and the political, the revelatory daily object, and the full embrace of our existence. For each facet of our lives Jane Hirshfield finds its transformative portrait, its particular memorable, singing and singular name.

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.

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human.