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Jane Hirshfield's Books

Come, Thief
Aug.23.2011
From the front flap: A revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence time cannot help but steal from our arms. Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into the moment and exchange something of herself with its finite music—and then, in seemingly simple, inevitable words, to deliver...
AFTER
Feb.15.2006
Given Sugar, Given Salt
Feb.01.2001
“What Hirshfield offers could not overtly be called love poems—and yet they are filled with ecstasy and wonder, the world made new in the fresh light of morning. Here is an all-encompassing love, shucking its reservations, liberated from its object so that it can settle at will on any object: button, clock, suitcase, ink, apple, hummingbird, elephant seal…. Given Sugar, Given Salt...
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Feb.01.1997
Nine essays investigating the deep infrastructure of poetic mind. "This enlightening volume... intensifies our reponse to poetry, hence to life." (Booklist, starred review) "Hirshfield's nine essays, or "gates," range a wide territory, in often strikingly beautiful language, to consider such subjects as concentration, prosody, translation, poetry's roots as...
Women In Praise of the Sacred
Feb.01.1994
From Publishers Weekly Edited by poet Jane Hirshfield, this anthology collects poetry by women from 43 centuries and many countries that speaks to matters of the spirit, from an Osage woman's planting initiation song ("I have made a footprint, a sacred one") to Maria de' Medici's poem to the virgin ("We mortals reign but over dreams and shadows") to the musings...
october palace cover.jpg
Feb.01.1994
“A radiant and passionate collection” --Carol Muske, The New York Times Book Review   “Hirshfield’s verbal power lies in a stunning physicality and the seductively rich music that such physicality engenders. She writes for readers who have lived a little, that is to say, a lot; who have lost, and grieved, and know how painful the capacity to love...
The Ink Dark Moon
Feb.01.1990
Poems by the two foremost women poets of Japanese literature, Ono no Komachi (8th c.) and Izumi Shikibu (11th c.). Predominantly love poems, but with strong Buddhist undercurrents, these five-line, 31 syllable tanka capture the essence of human life, in Heian-era Japan, and today.