The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield

The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield

In The Lives of the Heart, Hirshfield explores the heart's difficult coursing amid the many circumstances of inner and outer life. Hirshfield has become known as one of our foremost poets of the natural world, and horses, fish, raccoons, maples hold in these new poems essential human knowledge; of necessary fortitude and unavoidable loss, of separation and wholeness, of passion's stubborn continuance and the transient gift of grace. A series of spells use a supple sliding syntax to startle the reader alive to the nature of waking, sleeping, illness, and departure; other poems use -wandering rhyme' in a more traditional muscularity of language. -Every good poem,' Hirshfield has written -is a portrait of the state of the soul.' In her fourth volume of poetry, Hirshfield brings to this task the sure and luminous brush of a poet working at full power.

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.