Table of Contents

11 Let Them Not Say

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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

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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

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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

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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

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99 Amor Fati
100 Snow
101 Kitchen
102 Harness
103 Rust Flakes on Wind
104 Pelt
105 Wood. Salt. Tin.
106 I Said

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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

About the Author

Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York and lives in northern California. Her first book of poetry published in the UK was Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), which draws on her collections Alaya (1982), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), The October Palace (1994), The Lives of the Heart (1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001). This was followed by four later collections from Bloodaxe in the UK, After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). In 2008 Bloodaxe published Jane Hirshfield's lectures Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures). Jane Hirshfield edited the bestselling anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred (1994), and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (1988) – another bestseller in the States – and, with Robert Bly, Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004). Her own poetry was translated into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, who also wrote the introduction to her Polish Selected Poems. She has won numerous literary awards.

Reviews

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.
*Prze Kroj (Poland)*

From the opening poem, “Let Them Not Say", to the closing, “My Debt”, the masterful ninth book [Ledger] from Hirshfield is an account of how “We did not-enough” to save the world. Most poems are no longer than a page, though some are considerably shorter (“My Silence” is only a title). They are set against a page and a half of prose in the middle of the book about “Capital” which, for the writer, is language “as slippery as any other kind of wealth”. Through this juxtaposition, Hirshfield urges a reckoning of human influence on – and interference with – the planet. In “As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us", she begins: “As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting” and ends, underscoring humanity’s obliviousness: “We scrape from the world its... wonder.../ Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.” Hirshfield suggests that people are unable, or unwilling, to comprehend their role in their own destruction: “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief.” Hirshfield’s world is one filled with beauty, from the “generosity” of grass to humanity’s connection to the muskrat. This is both a paean and a heartbreaking plea.
*Publishers Weekly*

Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human.
*The Scotsman*

Her poetry is a rich and assured gift… an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction…The poems’ realised ambition is wisdom.
*Agenda*