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Title details for The Asking by Jane Hirshfield - Available

The Asking

New and Selected Poems

by Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Audiobook
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The long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here”
In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.
            In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection—drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing—brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.
            With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 12, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593791790
      • File size: 156695 KB
      • Duration: 05:26:26

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Jane Hirshfield is a wonderful poet (and essayist, although not in this collection) with a wonderfully broad range of interests. Among the poems here is an ode to buttons. She is also a fine reader of her own work. Her voice has a consistently soft texture from which she manages to wring a considerable range of emotion, always sounding as though she is speaking directly and personally to the listener. While the nominal subjects of the new and selected poems here have varied widely over the years, Hirshfield's general themes have remained consistent: an exploration of the natural world and our place in it, and the role of spirituality in our appreciation of that place. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 20, 2023
      Spanning from 1971 to 2023, this outstanding chronological selection begins with new, uncollected work and ends with a portion from “Ledger,” published in 2020. A longtime practitioner of California Zen Buddhism who approaches poetry with the discipline of daily prayer, Hirshfield directs her poems at the natural world while examining problems of the self: “To be personal is easy:.../ I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal.” Poems about love are present throughout the author’s oeuvre. Still, Hirshfield wrestles with contradiction and despair; the lines “everything is still possible” and “everything now is finished” appear in the same poem. She is particularly skilled at writing short verses hinged on surprise; “Two Kerosene Lanterns,” for instance, wittily casts a mishap from a cat’s point of view. Doors and windows are frequent metaphors, as in “Three Times My Life Has Opened”: “There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light/ stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,/ or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.” Longer poems take on difficult topics, including today’s political and environmental crises. These muscular yet lyrical poems offer necessary reminders of joy in a world marked by suffering.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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