Beauty

Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York and lives in northern California. Her first book of poetry published in the UK was Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), which draws on her collections Alaya (1982), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), The October Palace (1994), The Lives of the Heart (1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001). This was followed by four later collections, After (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come, Thief (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), The Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015) and Ledger (2020). In 2008 Bloodaxe published Jane Hirshfield's lectures Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures). Jane Hirshfield edited the bestselling anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred (1994), and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (1988) – another bestseller in the States – and, with Robert Bly, Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004). Her own poetry was translated into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, who also wrote the introduction to her Polish Selected Poems. She has won numerous literary awards.

'Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious - Wittily deductive and meta-physically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' - Donna Seaman, Booklist. 'Clear-eyed and often numinous poems - a deepening attention to every aspect of human experience, from the dailiness of our lives to the most ineffable moments' - Steven Ratiner, Washington Post. 'Jane Hirshfield is a poet very close to my heart' - Wislawa Szymborska. 'A profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings - It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield - In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness' - Czeslaw Milosz, Prze Kroj (Poland). 'Her poetry is a rich and assured gift - an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction - The poems' realised ambition is wisdom' - Alison Brackenbury, Agenda. 'Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human' - The Scotsman.