Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is among the most celebrated writers of our times. Her publications include ten collections of poetry most recently The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023) along with two collections of essays on poetry and four co-translated volumes presenting world poets from the past. These have become indispensable companions for readers and writers who turn to them for insight and encouragement. Her poetry invites us to consider the convergences that shape our experience, writing as one who “orchestrates silences” (Ilya Kaminsky) through poems that “often feel like whole landscapes, graciously embracing the widest view and the tiniest sequins at once” (Naomi Shihab Nye).

Her poems voice a deep concern for the biosphere, probing interconnection as they point to the quiet revelations joining us in the ordinary moments of life. They are like songs that linger in the silences at the edge of hearing. They invite us to see how poetry “is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world,” as she puts it.

As one of our culture’s most beloved writers, her interests are in what she describes as “poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body.” To enter her poems is to find ourselves in a realm where language speaks within the heart’s silences, inviting us to discover how everything, even the darkness, is radiant for those with eyes to see.