The Beauty

By Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original 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 2005, followed by After in 2006, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and then Come, Thief in 2011. Jane Hirshfield's latest collection, The Beauty, opens with a series of poems exploring both the profundities and the quirks of our shared human existence. She draws intimate meaning from multiple realms: science, culture, language itself, and above all the luminous materials and minutely particular emotions of daily life. In their robust negotiation with fate and justice, these clear and moving poems open a new and steepened understanding of our lives' full measure of losses, knowledge, and loves. 'Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious' Wittily deductive and metaphysically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' - Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Come, Thief

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780372471

Jane Hirshfield

The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Book preview

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Reviews for The Beauty

[dasam-5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jane Hirshfield never disappoints---although the poems in the first and last sections were the strongest. The entire collection exudes a Zen influence, using nature and the commonplace to find an emotional and spiritual resignation or reconciliation with the Way of the world.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps noth the best and worst thing about this collection is that HIrshfield shows great affinity for the likes of Basho and other Japanese poets, this is especially evident in a poem like "Anywhere You Look." At their best, these poems reach out from the deep hearts of comon things and into the frayed and astonished world that surrounds them, as in "I Wanted Only a Little." However, most of these poems seem isolated inside an aesthetics of the everyday. Self-contained poems about the nature of chairs or of cleaning mushrooms in the kitchen. They seem almost unnervingly comfortable. The poems are deftly composed, in terms of line and sound, but often they do not call out into the world and its immediate concerns. I suppose poetry might not need that all the time, but when it is absent I, as a reader, am always a bit dissatisfied.