Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many readers in navigating their own lives.

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.

Following the publication of her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, Bloodaxe has published Jane Hirshfield's later collections 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). Her later retrospective, The Asking: New & Selected Poems (2024), includes selections from all of these.

About the Author

Jane Hirshfield, born in New York City and a longtime resident of northern California, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Asking: New & Selected Poems (US, Knopf, 2023; UK, Bloodaxe Books, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This draws upon books including her earlier UK retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), and four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). After was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Called 'one of the most important writers in the world today' (The New York Times Magazine) and one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere, she is the founder of an online and travelling interactive exhibit exploring the alliance of poetry and science. Also the author of Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, 2008) and two now-classic US collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), she has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past: the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (US, 1988; UK 2023) and The Heart of Haiku (2011), both with Mariko Aratani; and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004), with Robert Bly. Her own poetry has been translated into seventeen languages, including by Czesław Miłosz, who wrote the introduction to her 2002 Polish Selected Poems. Recipient of numerous literary awards, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she has taught at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, and elsewhere, and was the 2022 Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast.

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