Name: The Beauty
Price: 18.95 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Jane Hirshfield
ISBN: 9780345806857

An incandescent collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices

The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging “My” poems–“My Skeleton,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” “My Weather”–in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, “Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won’t use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me.” With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.” Her recipes for that world (“add salt to hunger,” “add time to trees”) offer an altered understanding of our lives’ losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

The Beauty, an incandescent new collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices, opens with a series of dappled, ranging “My” poems—“My Skeleton,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” “My Weather”—using materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by; reflecting on advice given her long ago—to avoid the word “or”—she concludes, “Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life.” Hirshfield’s lines cut, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability, her tender consciousness of the unjudging beauty of what exists, her abiding contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings, sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For this poet, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.” Hirshfield’s riddling recipes for that world (“add salt to hunger”; “add time to trees”) offer a profoundly altered understanding of our lives’ losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

“Gracefully evocative … [Hirshfield’s] pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge…[her] contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a beautifully agile and sage volume.”— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“An exquisite collection that displays her talents of observation and her willingness to look at life through the lens of hindsight.” —Anisse Gross, The San Francisco Gate

“Hirshfield’s new poems emerge as fiercely strong yet tender, drawing on supple intuition and clarifying intelligence to evoke the richness of her authentic inner life. Hirshfield sees beyond self, perceiving fresh perspectives flowing through our permeability and interconnection.” —Robert Bonazzi, World Literature Today

“The Beauty composes the ordinary fruit, in the ordinary kitchen, the ants, the towels, the hopes, the loss, the way we humans believe and lose faith, all of it contained in the hours of every single ordinary day, and renders it beautiful, noticeable.” —Kirsten Rian, The Oregonian

“Throughout The Beauty, her gracefully evocative eighth book of poems, Hirshfield is archly witty and riddling. In “My Skeleton,” for example, she offers a fresh and startling look at our relationship with our bodies, a subject rooted in her fascination with perception, science, and underlying structures of all kinds. Her succinct and arresting observations—often framed within such everyday moments as waking in the morning and sitting in a kitchen, and inspired by the subtle wonders of honey, cellophane, church bells, even the journey of a common cold—swerve suddenly and exhilaratingly onto metaphysical terrain. Her pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge: “Generation. / Strange word: both making and passing.” Hirshfield’s contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a
beautifully agile and sage volume.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield’s eighth collection, reveals a poet at the height of her powers. With her signature use of deceptively simple images and language, she hints at the unspoken truths that lie just beyond our perspective while celebrating the everyday details and connections that make a life. . . While many of these poems are brief, they are masterpieces in miniature. Their images are simple but not obvious; they are offered without judgment. They also reward contemplation. Hirshfield asks her readers to wait for their own reactions, suggesting that those reactions matter because they open the door to the poem’s meaning, and because they unite us all. –Jeanette Zwart, Shelf Awareness

A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week

The Beauty

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Success!

By Jane Hirshfield