| Edition |
1st ed. |
| Description |
x, 93 pages ; 22 cm |
| Summary |
A 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. |
| Contents |
French horn -- First light edging cirrus -- The decision -- Vinegar and oil -- The tongue says loneliness -- Big-leaf maple standing over its own reflection -- Critique of pure reason -- Narrowness -- These also once under moonlight -- "Distance makes clean" -- Of yield and abandon -- The conversation -- Perishable, it said -- Fourth world -- Bruises -- The pear -- Alzheimer's -- Heat and desperation -- Left-handed sugar -- The promise -- Red wine is fined by adding broken Eggshells -- The lost love poems of Sappho -- Building and earthquake -- Each we call fate -- The visible heat -- Sometimes the heart is a shallow autumn river -- Love in August -- Two rains -- Washing doorknobs -- Chapel -- Tolstoy and the spider -- For the lichens -- Sweater -- Seawater stiffens cloth -- The inventive, visible hobbles -- "Haofon Rece Swealg" -- Shadow: an assay -- The question -- All day the difficult waiting -- Wild plum -- Sheep -- The dark hour -- Everything has two endings -- Protractor -- The present -- It must be leaves -- Haibun: a mountain rowboat -- Green-striped melons -- China -- Come, thief -- Sentencings -- If truth is the lure, humans are fishes -- Izmir -- A blessing for wedding -- Fifteen pebbles -- The kind man -- All the difficult hours and minutes -- Rain thinking -- Invitation -- Contentment -- The egg had frozen, an accident. I thought of my life -- Three-legged blues -- A roomless door -- A small-sized mystery -- Bamboo -- A day is vast -- A thought -- Pompeii -- One loss folds itself inside another -- Stone and knife -- Suitcase -- My luck -- A hand is shaped for what it holds or makes -- I ran out naked in the sun -- When your life looks back -- The supple deer. |
| Summary |
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. |
| Subject |
American poetry.
|
|
American poetry. (OCoLC)fst00807348
|
|
Lyrik.
|
|
Amerikanisches Englisch.
|
|
Poetry.
|
| ISBN |
9780307595423 |
|
0307595420 |
|
9780375712074 (pbk.) |
|
0375712070 (pbk.) |
| Standard No. |
40019805348 |
|
