Full Description
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.
Contents
11 Let Them Not Say
*
15 The Bowl
16 I wanted to be surprised.
18 Vest
20 An Archaeology
21 Fecit
22 Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes
23 As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us
24 Description
25 Ants' Nest
26 A Bucket Forgets Its Water
27 Questionnaire
29 You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another
30 Chance darkened me.
31 Some Questions
33 Today, Another Universe
34 The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold
*
37 Now a Darkness Is Coming
38 Words
39 Homs
40 She Breathes in the Scent
41 A Folding Screen
42 Practice
43 Cataclysm
44 Paint
45 Heels
46 Cold, Clear
47 Capital: An Assay
49 Falcon
50 Spell to Be Said Against Hatred
*
53 Advice to Myself
54 Notebook
55 In Ulvik
56 O Snail
57 Branch
58 Without Night-shoes
59 The Bird Net
60 Corals, Coho, Coelenterates
61 To My Fifties
62 Brocade
63 Interruption: An Assay
65 My Doubt
67 My Contentment
68 My Hunger
69 My Longing
70 My Dignity
72 My Glasses
73 My Wonder
74 My Silence
*
77 A Ream of Paper
78 Lure
79 A Moment Knows Itself Penultimate
81 Bluefish
82 Almond, Rabbit
83 The Paw-paw
84 Musa Paradisiaca
85 It Was as if a Ladder
87 Like Others
88 Husband
89 Wild Turkeys
90 Nine Pebbles
90 Without blinking
90 Like that other-hand music
90 Retrospective
91 Library book with many precisely turned-down corners
91 Now even more
91 Haiku: monadnock
92 A strategy
92 Sixth extinction
92 Obstacle
93 They Have Decided
94 Things Seem Strong
95 Dog Tag
96 Biophilia
*
99 Amor Fati
100 Snow
101 Kitchen
102 Harness
103 Rust Flakes on Wind
104 Pelt
105 Wood. Salt. Tin.
106 I Said
*
109 Ledger
110 In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia
111 Engraving: World-tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch
112 (No Wind, No Rain)
113 On the Fifth Day
115 Page
117 My Confession
118 Ghazal for the End of Time
119 Mountainal
120 My Debt
125 Acknowledgements
