A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky writes that Jane Hirshfield "approaches the poem in a way that feels exactly right to me: plainly, reverently, intelligently." This is true both in her essays about poetry (see Nine Gates ) and in her poems. Her recurrent themes of art, nature, and mystery startle the reader in many of these poems. Take, for example, the intriguingly titled "Lying," which is short enough to quote in its entirety: "He puts his brush to the canvas, / with one quick stroke / unfolds a bird from the sky. / Steps back, considers. / Takes pity. / Unfolds another." A gifted writer in midcareer, Hirshfield has published her fourth collection of poetry in tandem with a book of essays geared toward the creative writing student. The poems are of the moment?each a single gesture encompassing the dichotomies of presence and absence, life and death, being and not-being?and are heavily influenced by classical Japanese verse Hirshfield helped translate with Mariko Aratani (Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems, by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu) and the Zen Buddhism she has studied for many years: "I turn my blessing like photographs into the light;/ over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on." The best are tragic in their unencumbered vision of human limitation; in one, the speaker listens to a piano played movingly?indeed, even more so, because it is played haltingly?and is ashamed "not at my tears, or even at what has been wasted,/ but to have been dry-eyed so long." Several of the nine essays in Nine Gates originated as lectures presented at writers' conferences. Clear and methodical?sometimes to the point of tediousness?they discuss the process of poetry with examples from standards like Frost, Yeats, Larkin, Whitman, and a few contemporaries. More individual are the discussions of non-Western verse and aesthetics and the process of translation from Japanese (Hirshfield cannot read Japanese and admits her translations were done cooperatively with a native speaker). In a rare personal confession, she describes herself to the late poet Richard Hugo, whom she did not know: "I don't write much/ about America, or even people. I'd often enough rather/ talk to horses." Indeed, it is the quiet restraint of these writings?poems and prose?that appeals. Recommended.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. "A radiant and passionate collection.""-- New York times Book Review""Hirshfield's verbal power lies in a stunning physicality and the seductively rich music that such physicality engenders . . .[She] writes for readers who have lived a little--that is to say, a lot; who have lost, and grieved, and know how painful the capacity to love can be.""-- Hungry Mind Review""Deeply grounded in nature and the everyday, these attentive, imagistically precise, celebratory poems reveal the interconnections between interior and exterior worlds.""-- Women's Review of Books" A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace. 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. The Lives of the Heart Poems By Hirshfield, Jane Perennial Copyright © 2004 Jane Hirshfield All right reserved. ISBN: 0060951699 The Lives of the Heart Are ligneous, muscular, chemical. Wear birch-colored feathers, green tunnels of horse-tail reed. Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres. Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist. Can be burned as tallow, as coal, can be skinned for garnets, for shoes. Cast shadows or light; shuffle; snort; cry out in passion. Are salt, are bitter, tear sweet grass with their teeth. Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn. Thrash in the net until hit. Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples, hiss lava-red into the sea. Leave the strange kiss of their bodies in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost, can be carried, broken, sung. Lie dormant until they are opened by ice, by drought. Go blind in the service of lace. Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad. Are stamped out in plastic, in tin. Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod, are strung on the blue backs of flies on the black backs of cows. Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets heavy with slaughter. Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers. Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blosso