A precise and passionate collection by a brave new voice in poetry. ea. vol: Wesleyan Univ. Pr., dist. by Harper. Feb. 1988. poetry Though their imagery is drawn from different sourcesBaumel's measured meditations evoking an urban upbringing, Hirshfield's lyrics exhibiting a Frostian preoccupation with natureboth poets share styles and techniques that are all too familiar: bland vocabularies employed in conventional, declarative sentences; personal reminiscences straining toward predictable, unearned profundities; passing nods to historical events, literary figures, and European locales. Often the poems address friends, lovers, and family members, like letters never mailed, but the recognitions and revelations never quite transcend the routine. Baumel, the 1987 Walt Whitman Award winner, is at her best when she attempts to connect laws of mathematics and science with human emotion, and Hirshfield seems most comfortable when emulating Japanese models, but overall their poemsto borrow a line from Baumel"repeat each task with regular skill." The skill is admirable; the regularity is unfortunate. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. "[It] is a rare joy to read Hirshfield's work."― The Bloomsbury Review "Jane Hirshfield's is a brave, new voice that, finding itself in its first volume, now goes on to ever more searching music, Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized."―Theodore Weiss 5 1/2 x 9 trim. LC 87-21184 'Jane Hirshfield's is a brave, new voice that, finding itself in its first volume, now goes on to ever more searching music. Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized.' - Theodore Weiss JANE HIRSHFIELD's first book, Alaya, received the Quarterly Review Of Literature Prize in 1982. In 1986, OF Gravity Angels receive d the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation for a book in progress; in 1989, it was awarded the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal. Hirshfield's third book The October Palace, published in 1994, received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the Poetry Center Book Award. She has also edited aand co-translated The Ink dark Moon: Poems be Komachi and Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1988) and edited Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). Hirshfield's other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockerfeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, Columbia University's Translatioon Center Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He has taught at the University of California at Berkely and the University of San Francisco and lives in Mill valley, California.