| Edition |
First paperback edition. |
| Description |
107 pages ; 24 cm |
| Note |
"This is a Borzoi Book"--Title page verso. |
| Contents |
Fado -- My Skeleton -- My Proteins -- Mosquito -- My Eyes -- My Species -- My Corkboard -- My Memory -- My Weather -- In My Wallet I Carry a Card -- My Task -- My Sandwich -- A Well Runs out of Thirst -- In A Room with Many Windows -- A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness -- A Cottony Fate -- Cellophane: An Assay -- Quartz Clock -- My Life Was the Size of My Life -- Perspective: An Assay -- Ordinary Rain. Every Leaf is Wet -- Things Keep Sorting Themselves -- I Wake Early -- In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed -- Honey -- Hamper -- Florists' Roses -- Mop Without Stick -- The Problem -- In Praise of Being Peripheral -- A Chair in Snow -- Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in -- Wet Spring -- Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight -- Anywhere You Look -- Anatomy and Making -- I Cast my Hook, I Decide to Make Peace -- A Person Protests to Fate -- Twelve Pebbles -- I Wanted Only a Little -- A Common Cold -- This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs -- Once, I -- In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights -- How Rarely I Have Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort -- As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail -- I Sat in the Sun -- Of Amplitude There is no Scraping Bottom -- The One not Chosen -- Snow in April -- February 29 -- Three Mornings -- Away from Home, I thought of the Exiled Poets -- All Souls -- In Space -- Souvenir -- The Must-Mice -- The Conversations I Remember Most -- Two Linen Handkerchiefs -- Works & Loves - Perspective Without any Point in which it Might Vanish -- Runner -- The Beautiful Austere Room -- Not One Moment of this a Subtraction -- I Profess the Uncertain -- Zero Plus Anything is a World -- Entanglement -- Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain |
| Summary |
The Beauty, an incandescent new collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices, opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--using materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by; reflecting on advice given her long ago--to avoid the word "or"--she concludes, "Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life." Hirshfield's lines cut, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability, her tender consciousness of the unjudging beauty of what exists, her abiding contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings, sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For this poet, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Hirshfield's riddling recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger"; "add time to trees") offer a profoundly altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss. -- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
American poetry.
|
|
American poetry. (OCoLC)fst00807348
|
|
American poetry.
|
| Genre/Form |
Poetry.
|
|
Poetry. (OCoLC)fst01423828
|
| Added Title |
Poems. Selections
|
| ISBN |
0345806859 |
|
9780345806857 |
|
9780385351072 (hardback) |
|
