Ledger

By Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth’s continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry – loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise – that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780375137

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

1

JANE HIRSHFIELD

LEDGER

Jane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time’s and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees.

The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth’s continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry – loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise – that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention.

‘Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart.’ – Wisława Szymborska

‘A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings… It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield… In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness.’ – Czesław Miłosz

‘Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it is to be human.’ – The Scotsman

Cover detail from Mediterranean portolan chart (1640) by Giovanni Battista Cavallini

Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Ledger

CONTENTS

Title Page

Let Them Not Say

*

The Bowl

I wanted to be surprised.

Vest

An Archaeology

Fecit

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes

As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us

Description

Ants’ Nest

A Bucket Forgets Its Water

Questionnaire

You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another

Chance darkened me.

Some Questions

Today, Another Universe

The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold

*

Now a Darkness Is Coming

Words

Homs

She Breathes in the Scent

A Folding Screen

Practice

Cataclysm

Paint

Heels

Cold, Clear

Capital: An Assay

Falcon

Spell to Be Said Against Hatred

*

Advice to Myself

Notebook

In Ulvik

O Snail

Branch

Without Night-shoes

The Bird Net

Corals, Coho, Coelenterates

To My Fifties

Brocade

Interruption: An Assay

My Doubt

My Contentment

My Hunger

My Longing

My Dignity

My Glasses

My Wonder

My Silence

*

A Ream of Paper

Lure

A Moment Knows Itself Penultimate

Bluefish

Almond, Rabbit

The Paw-paw

Musa Paradisiaca

It Was as if a Ladder

Like Others

Husband

Wild Turkeys

Nine Pebbles

WITHOUT BLINKING

LIKE THAT OTHER-HAND MUSIC

RETROSPECTIVE

LIBRARY BOOK WITH MANY PRECISELY TURNED-DOWN CORNERS

NOW EVEN MORE

HAIKU: MONADNOCK

A STRATEGY

SIXTH EXTINCTION

OBSTACLE

They Have Decided

Things Seem Strong

Dog Tag

Biophilia

*

Amor Fati

Snow

Kitchen

Harness

Rust Flakes on Wind

Pelt

Wood. Salt. Tin.

I Said

*

Ledger

In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia

Engraving: World-tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch

(No Wind, No Rain)

On the Fifth Day

Page

My Confession

Ghazal for the End of Time

Mountainal

My Debt

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About

Reviews for Ledger

[archangelsbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simply magnificent!