Description

“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.

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.

Praise For…

“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)