Jane Hirshfield’s
poetry speaks to the central issues of human existence—desire
and loss, impermanence and beauty, the many dimensions of our
connection to others and to the creatures and objects with which
we share our lives. Demonstrating with quiet authority what
it means to awaken into the full capacities of attention, her
work sets forth a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Described
by reviewers as “radiant and passionate,” “ethically
aware,” “insightful and eloquent,” and as
conveying “a succinct wisdom,” her work ranges from
the metaphysical and passionate to the political and scientific
to the subtle unfolding of daily life. Her book of essays on
the “mind of poetry” and three anthologies recording
the work of women poets from the past are each considered classics
in their fields. An intimate, profound, and generous master
of her art, Hirshfield has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley
and elsewhere, a member of the Bennington College MFA faculty,
and has been received with wide acclaim in her many appearances
at writers conferences, literary centers, and festivals both
in this country and abroad.
Jane Hirshfield is the
author of six collections of poetry, including After
(which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize,
nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry,
and also chosen as one of the best books of 2006 by the Washington
Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial
Times), Given
Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics
Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award),
The
Lives of the Heart, and The
October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine
Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and
co-translated The
Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of
the Ancient Court of Japan, Women
in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by
Women, and Mirabai:
Ecstatic Poems. Hirshfield’s other honors include
The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim
and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s
Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California’s
Poetry Medal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The
Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry,
five editions of The Best American Poetry, and many other
publications, and has been featured numerous times on Garrison
Keillor’s Writers Almanac program, as well as in two Bill
Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield
was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic
achievement by The
Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such
poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
and Elizabeth Bishop.
•••
“Jane Hirshfield is
one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets.”
--The American Poet
“Jane Hirshfield
is one of our most insightful and eloquent voices.”
— Bloomsbury
Review
“Hirshfield’s
poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply,
to articulate experience precisely . . . Her poems are meant
to endure.”
— The Antioch Review
“Jane Hirshfield is
a poet very close to my heart.”
