Poetry Book Society Choice

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, 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. Her latest collection, After, 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 ñ some overt, others implicit ñ these poems resound with a bass-note awareness of time, its inexorable subtractions but also its exuberant gifts.

"Her poetry is a rich and assured giftÖan extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstractionÖ The poems' realised ambition is wisdom."
Alison Brackenbury, Agenda

"Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human."
The Scotsman

"Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart."
Wislawa Szymborska

"A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beingsÖ It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane HirshfieldÖ In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness."
Czeslaw Milosz, Prze Kroj (Poland)