| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
ix, 93 pages ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
What the heart wants -- Red poppies -- Each step -- The shadow -- The house in winter -- Cycladic figure: the harp player (circa 3000 B.C.E.) -- History as the painter bonnard -- The wedding -- A plenitude -- Narcissus: Tel Aviv, Baghdad, San Francisco; February 1991 -- For the autumn dead: election day, 1984 -- "Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness" -- Storm: Yaddo, 1989 -- In the year eight hundred -- The ritual -- A recurring possibility -- The world -- Floor -- The hawk cry -- The sting -- Autumn -- What falls -- The door -- 1973 -- Happiness -- This love -- Inspiration -- The love of aged horses -- At nightfall -- Percolation -- The groundfall pear -- At the Roosevelt baths -- A breakable spell -- For a wedding on Mount Tamalpais -- The mesmer -- Under the river -- Courtship -- The water diamonds -- For a gelding -- The task -- In yellow grass -- Even the vanishing housed -- A sweetening all around me as it falls -- The November angels -- Of the body -- The thief -- Leaving the October palace -- Just below the surface -- Ripeness -- The weighing -- Meeting the light completely -- The Gods are not large -- The heart as origami -- An earthly beauty -- Witin this tree -- Empedocles' physics -- The window -- The stone of heaven. |
| Summary |
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. The poems address subjects ranging from the importance of "sabbath" moments in which nothing seems to happen and the love between two aged horses to Lavoisier's discovery of modern chemistry and the 1989 "velvet revolutions" of Eastern Europe. |
|
Grounded in a series of meditations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world - a heart envisioned as an almost independent being, whose own needs and desires require of us integration, acceptance, and finally praise - The October Palace is contemplative and sensuous, intellectual and emotional, philosophical and musical, and, above all, serious in its encounter with precisely experienced and deeply questioned life. |
| Subject |
American poetry -- 20th century.
|
|
American poetry. (OCoLC)fst00807348
|
| Chronological Term |
1900 - 1999
|
| Genre/Form |
Poetry (OCoLC)fst01423828
|
|
Poetry.
|
| ISBN |
0060553480 |
|
9780060553487 |
|
0060969970 (pbk.) |
|
9780060969974 (pbk.) |
|
