Two Poems:
"Flowering Vetch"
"'To': An Assay"
from Jane Hirshfield's
After

Jane Hirshfield:

Jane Hirshfield's books of poetry include After; Given Sugar, Given Salt; The Lives of the Heart; The October Palace; Of Gravity & Angels; and Alaya. She is also the author of a collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and editor and co-translator of three collections, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan; and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, National Endowment for the Arts, and Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, Hirshfield's work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, Orion, and The American Poetry Review. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley; at the University of Cincinnati; and in Bennington College's MFA Writing Seminars. (Photo © 2006 Mark Moffett)

About After:

"Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins," ends the first poem in After, Jane Hirshfield's extended investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. These alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. In respective series of "assays" (meditative imaginative accountings) and "pebbles" (each a "brief, easily pocketable perception that remains incomplete until the reader's own response awakens inside it"), Hirshfield explores a poetry-making that looks simultaneously outward and inward, finding resonant and precise containers for the deepest currents of our inner life.

After is also a book of elegies, both overt and implicit, both personal and culturally shared. Throughout sounds a bass-note awareness of time: its inexorable effects on our lives and the plunge into the moment's richness that brings our singular, paradoxical recourse against its erasure. This is a profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation.

Praise for Jane Hirshfield's earlier books

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

"A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings.... It is precisely this I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield. The subject of her poetry is our ordinary life among other people and our continuing encounter with everything Earth brings us: trees, flowers, animals, and birds. Much depends on whether we can treasure each moment in this way and whether we are able to respond to cats, dogs, and horses with a friendliness equal to that we bring to people. In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness.... She is among the most outstanding of my fraternity of California poets."
— Czeslaw Milosz

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

"An evocative mix of control and wildness, stunning beauty and unseen forces."
— Christian Science Monitor

"There is something subtle and new in Jane Hirshfield's poems.... She has absorbed the vertical line through her discipline, and it gives her poems an intensity that doesn't kill ordinary life, or subdue the body as some vertical studies do. The poem that best evokes those wooden rooms where the sitter spends so many years is 'The Envoy'... one of the greatest poems of the last fifty years."
— Robert Bly

"Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets."
— David Baker

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