After

by Jane Hirshfield

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060779191
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/20/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	459,607
Product dimensions:	8.94(w) x 10.84(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

After

Poems

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By Jane Hirshfield

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Jane Hirshfield
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060779160

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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...

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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.

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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

Donna Seaman

“...finely measured and carefully weighted poems...stirring new collection.”

Editorial Reviews

After is filled with treasures.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Now this is inspired poetry.” — Nathan Bierma, Chicago Tribune

“Finely measured and carefully weighted poems....Hirshfield even calls her short poems ‘pebbles,’ and, indeed, they send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart.” — Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Nobel Laureate in Literature for poetry

“Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets.” — David Baker, (from an essay about to appear in The American Poet)

“...finely measured and carefully weighted poems...stirring new collection.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

Serious, prayerful and governed by quietly sweeping abstract lines, Hirshfield's sixth collection of verse continues the meditative direction established in 2001's well-received Given Sugar, Given Salt. She subtitles many poems "an assay," meaning both a try and an exposition: the sky, the words "of " and "to" and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe all become such discursive test cases. Some assays are prose poems, a form that balances out Hirshfield's tropism toward restrained wonder. The tone overall, however, inclines decisively toward sadness and grief: the poet aspires "to live amid the great vanishing a cat must live,/ one shadow fully at ease inside another." Hirshfield brings a plainspoken American spirituality (think of Mary Oliver or Robert Bly) to bear on her interest in East Asian practice: a set of quite short (one to five lines) lyric efforts, under the collective title "Seventeen Pebbles," pares Hirshfield's sensibility to a Zen concision. A longer Japanese-influenced poem concludes, "slowness alone is not to be confused/ with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens." Clarification makes for consolation in this gentle and very unified book. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The conversational yet metaphysical poems in Hirshfield's (Given Sugar, Given Salt) sixth collection look at everyday circumstances through a foreshortened lens. Images of flowers, fruits, stones, wolves, beetles, fireflies, paintings, and dogs-most of these poems mention dogs-all represent elusive emotional states. In "Lemons," e.g., Hirshfield uses grated lemon rind bitters to suggest the moment when one lover knows that his feelings are not reciprocated. The best poems are spare meditations on life's disappointments. They usually begin in the middle of things, letting the context accrue gradually until they end in mystery, as in "Seventeen Pebbles," a series of 17 poems each resembling haiku. One could easily become heavy-handed and maudlin with these subjects-many of the poems feel as though they were written at the end of a love affair. But Hirshfield, whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and The New Yorker, manages to avoid just that with vivid imagery, understatement, and a tone that is emotionally distant but not removed. Her poetic voice-although distinctly her own-faintly echoes the work of Louise Gluck and Robert Haas. Suitable for all libraries.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

...finely measured and carefully weighted poems...stirring new collection.

Donna Seaman