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Overview
"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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780060779191 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 02/20/2007 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 112 |
Sales rank: | 432,642 |
Product dimensions: | 8.94(w) x 10.84(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
After
PoemsBy Jane Hirshfield
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Jane HirshfieldAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060779160
After Long Silence
Politeness fades,
a small anchovy gleam
leaving the upturned pot in the dish rack
after the moon has wandered out of the window.
One of the late freedoms, there in the dark.
The leftover soup put away as well.
Distinctions matter. Whether a goat's
quiet face should be called noble
or indifferent. The difference between a right rigor and pride.
The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
Continues...
Excerpted from After by Jane Hirshfield Copyright © 2006 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
After Long Silence 1
Pyracantha and Plum 2
Flowering Vetch 3
Theology 4
Hope: An Assay 6
To Judgment: An Assay 7
Those Who Cannot Act 9
Sheep's Cheese 10
Beneath the Snow, the Badger's Steady Breathing 11
Sky: An Assay 12
Pocket of Fog 13
Articulation: An Assay 14
Translucence: An Assay 15
What Is Usual Is Not What Is Always 16
The Mountain 17
Tears: An Assay 18
Poe: An Assay 19
The Refusal 21
Dog and Bear 22
Downed Branch 23
Vilnius 24
"Of": An Assay 25
"To": An Assay 26
"And": An Assay 28
Study of Melon & Insect 29
A Man Walks Through His Life 30
A Day Comes 31
The Double 32
Not Only Parallel Lines Extend to the Infinite 34
I Imagine Myself in Time 35
The Meeting 36
Wanting More and More to Live Unobserved,Unobserving 37
The Destination 38
Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt 39
Ryoanji: An Assay 40
To Opinion 41
The Woodpecker Keeps Returning 43
"It is night. It is very dark." 44
Bonsai 45
The Promise 46
The Heat of Autumn 47
To Wake at 3:00 48
Dog Still Barking at Midnight 49
Two Washings 50
Termites: An Assay 51
Envy: An Assay 52
Hesitation: An Assay 53
Once: An Assay 54
Burlap Sack 56
The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow 57
I Write These Words to Delay 58
Seventeen Pebbles 59
To Spareness 65
"Ah!": An Assay 67
Against Certainty 68
Jasper, Feldspar, Quartzite 69
Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant 70
One Sand Grain Among the Others in Winter Wind 71
To Speech 72
Possibility: An Assay 76
Bad Year 77
Serrano Pepper 78
This Much Is Promised 79
In a Room with Five People, Six Griefs 80
Ask Much, the Voice Suggested 81
To Gravel: An Assay 82
Each Morning My Neighbor Walks Out 83
Between the Material World and the World of Feeling 84
Red Scarf 85
The Bell Zygmunt 86
Letter to C 87
The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead 91
It Was Like This: You Were Happy 92
Acknowledgments 95
What People are Saying About This
“...finely measured and carefully weighted poems...stirring new collection.”