After by Jane Hirshfield

After by Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets. --David Baker, The American Poet

Hirshfield's poems . . . send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness. -- Booklist (starred review)

A profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. Jane Hirshfield's alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from sparseness, 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.

The Beauty, Come, Thief, After, and Given Sugar, Given Salt are among Jane Hirschfield's eight collections of poetry. She is the author of two significant collections of articles, Nine Gates: Accessing the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Change the World, and has edited and cotranslated four books showcasing the work of former poets. Her books have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize in England.