 |
|
|
Jane Hirshfield’s work has been called “passionate
and radiant” by The New York Times. Her poetry is an extension
of a life both lived and examined, and her carefully crafted poems range
from elegiac to joyful, reflective to restive. “At some point I
realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one
end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full
spectrum of what happens,” she says. “Everything I am and
know and have lived goes into a poem.”
Of her most recent collection, Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for
the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, W.S. Merwin says, “These are
poems of space, air and a remarkable precision of observation and revealed feeling.” The
Antioch Review praises her ability to “renew [and] reaffirm the power
of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. She doesn’t
try to discard the tradition, but to draw from it and extend it. Her poems are
meant to endure.”
As a young adult, Hirshfield spent eight years in full-time Zen Buddhist practice
before becoming a writer, translator, and teacher. Meticulously crafted, layered
with complexity but seeking clarity and awareness, her poems offer graceful and
deliberate observations of the natural world and the emotional world.
The author of five collections of poems, Hirshfield has also edited and co-translated
three poetry anthologies focusing on women’s spiritual lives, including The
Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shibibu. Her volume of essays, Nine
Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, in Robert Pinsky’s words, “approaches
the poem in a way that feels exactly right to me: plainly, reverently, intelligently.”
Hirshfield’s many honors include fellowships from The Academy of American
Poets and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the NEA. She has taught
widely, and served as guest poet at universities and conferences across the country.
Featured on NPR as well as in two Bill Moyers PBS specials, Hirshfield makes
her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
|
|
