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. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking includes work from her earlier retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005), as well as drawing upon four later collections, After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020), along with a selection of 31 new poems. The book takes its title from the close of one of those new poems: ‘don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking’. Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes. In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war and love in myriad forms, this collection brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap. With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.

"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

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, 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 indispensible to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield's structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

Jane Hirshfield’s 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. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth’s continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry – loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise – that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

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. Following the publication of her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, Bloodaxe has published Jane Hirshfield's later collections in the UK: After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). 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 an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each facet of our lives its transformative portrait, its particular memorable, singing and singular name.

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, 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 2004. "After" was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is an extended investigation into incarnation, transience and interconnection. These alert, incisive and compassionate poems examine 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. Often elegies - some overt, others implicit - these poems resound with a bass-note awareness of time, its inexorable subtractions but also its exuberant gifts.

In this innovative series of public lectures at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by "Bloodaxe", giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Jane Hirshfield 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. "Poetry and Hiddenness: Thoreau's Hound Explorations of Hiddenness" go back to the beginning of literature. There is no paradise, no place of true completion, that does not include within its walls the unknown. In this lecture, Hirshfield explores the centrality and necessity of hiddenness in our lives, and elucidates both the uses of hiddenness and hidden meanings in the work of writers ranging from Homer to Cavafy, from Auden to Jack Gilbert.Poetry and Uncertainty - To be human is to be unsure, and if the purpose of poetry is to deepen the humanness in us, poetry will be unsure as well. This lecture illuminates the ways uncertainty - in poems, and in life - allows both broadened feeling and enlarged knowledge. Translations are central to this talk, which includes poems by Izumi Shikibu, Anna Swir, Fernando Pessoa and Paul Celan. "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise Poems" preserve their inaugural newness in part because they are like the emotions - not object, but experience, event. Poems that last are those that do not lose the power to astonish. This lecture examines surprise as a central, unrecognised fulcrum of great poems. Three poems are then looked at in detail by Hirshfield as test-cases: "Ithaka" by C.P. Cavafy, "Oysters" by Seamus Heaney and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost.

"This is a powerful first collection by a very promising new writer--successfully announcing what will hopefully be a long-lasting presence in contemporary poetry."--"MARY: A Journal for New Writing"

Selected by Jane Hirshfield from over six hundred manuscripts, "Litany for the City "is the winner of the tenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Of "Litany for the City," Hirshfield writes, "This book carries both startling imaginative freedoms and the impulsion of a person navigating the terrain of his life by means of the star-chart and sextant of poems--a winning combination, for me."

Ryan Teitman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He holds an MA and MFA from Indiana University. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.

Here is a collection of sexy, brief, fleeting poems about love, lust and longing. They originate from a time in Japanese history where aristocratic women of the Heian court were free to marry and conduct love affairs according to their desires. Education and refinement were so highly valued that the courtly manner of expressing oneself, whether to give condolences for a death, to send back a forgotten fan, or to heighten the anticipation of a lover's visit, was with a poem of just five lines. A convention of secrecy surrounding love affairs fills these verses with palpable emotion. These vivid and erotic poems express love in all its forms, and do so with amazing economy of words, unforgettable imagery and breath-taking modernity. INTRODUCED BY NIKITA GILL 'They are full of dreams, of autumns, of lovers known or not yet met, of desire, wonderment, loneliness' Irish Times Translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, this is an edition that brings the story of the poems to life with a detailed introduction and notes on the translation.

These translated poems were written by 2 ladies of the Heian court of Japan between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.

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 short-listed 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.

An investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence, by one of the preeminent poets of her generation

In this luminous and authoritative new 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."

In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, 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.

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.

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 August
"
White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.
Some clamor
in envy.
Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief
who wants to put
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.

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