Ledger
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About this ebook
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.
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.
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Book preview
Ledger - Jane Hirshfield
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
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