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Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, followed by After in 2006, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and then Come, Thief in 2011. Jane Hirshfield's latest collection, The Beauty, opens with a series of poems exploring both the profundities and the quirks of our shared human existence. She draws intimate meaning from multiple realms: science, culture, language itself, and above all the luminous materials and minutely particular emotions of daily life. In their robust negotiation with fate and justice, these clear and moving poems open a new and steepened understanding of our lives' full measure of losses, knowledge, and loves. Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious
Wittily deductive and metaphysically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Come, Thief. Cover -- Description -- Title Page -- Contents -- Fado -- My Skeleton -- My Proteins -- Mosquito -- My Eyes -- My Species -- My Corkboard -- My Memory -- My Weather -- In My Wallet I Carry a Card -- My Task -- My Sandwich -- A Well Runs Out of Thirst -- In a Room with Many Windows -- A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness -- A Cottony Fate -- Cellophane: An Assay -- Quartz Clock -- My Life Was the Size of My Life -- Perspective: An Assay -- Ordinary Rain. Every Leaf Is Wet. -- Things Keep Sorting Themselves -- I Wake Early -- In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed -- Honey -- Hamper -- Florists' Roses -- Mop Without Stick -- The Problem -- In Praise of Being Peripheral -- A Chair in Snow -- Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives In -- Wet Spring -- Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight -- Anywhere You Look -- Anatomy and Making -- I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace -- A Person Protests to Fate -- TWELVE PEBBLES -- A Hand Holds One Power -- The Woman, The Tiger -- Tri-Focal -- I Know You Think I've Forgotten -- Still Life -- A man I once asked a question of has died -- his son sends a letter. -- Human Measures -- Immigration & Hunger -- Humbling: An Assay -- For Fifteen Years -- A map open on one table, a guidebook on the other -- Making & Passing -- I Wanted Only a Little -- A Common Cold -- This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs -- Once, I -- In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights -- How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort -- As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail -- I Sat in the Sun -- Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom -- The One Not Chosen -- Snow in April -- February 29 -- Three Mornings -- Away from Home, I Thought of the Exiled Poets -- All Souls -- In Space -- Souvenir -- The Must-Mice -- The Conversations I Remember Most -- Two Linen Handkerchiefs -- Works & Loves.
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