Jane Hirshfield

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...

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.

Collects poetry that explores such diverse topics as global warming, sneezing, and our relationship to certainty, possibility, judgment, and grief, while reflecting on the influence of time on human life.

"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'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 inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to...

This groundbreaking anthology presents the spiritual life of women throughout history as recorded in their poems, prayers, and songs. Beginning with the hymns of the world's earliest identified author (a Sumerian moon priestess) and continuing to the first half of the twentieth century, it draws from the major religious traditions of East and West as well as from several indigenous cultures. Among the seventy women included are mystics and healers,...

"Best Literary Translations (BLT) is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the literary journals that publish that work. BLT features poetry and prose originally written in twenty-two languages, brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. The four co-editors chose a long list of finalists from the five hundred nominations. BLT's poems, short stories, essays,...