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The Beauty

Poems

Author Jane Hirshfield
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Paperback
$18.95 US
| $24.95 CAN
Knopf
On sale Feb 21, 2017 | 128 Pages | 9780345806857
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An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices 

The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") offer an altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

My Eyes
 
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
 
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
 
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
 
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
 
_______
 
I Wake Early
 
I wake early,
make two cups of coffee,
drink one,
think, go back to sleep,
wake again, think,
drink the other.
 
To start a day over
is a card game played for no money,
a ripe tomato,
a swimming cat.
 
Time here:
lukewarm,
with milk and sugar,
big and unset as a table.
 
I wake twice.
 
Twice the window
unbroken, transparent.
 
Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.
Twice the war (my war)
is distant,
its children’s children are distant.
 
_______
 
 
Zero Plus Anything Is a World
 
Four less one is three.
 
Three less two is one.
 
One less three
is what, is who,
remains.
 
The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.
 
Recipe:
add salt to hunger.
 
Recipe:
add time to trees.
 
Zero plus anything
is a world.
 
This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each breath changed.
 
Recipe:
add death to life.
 
Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.
 
Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.
 
Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,
then another.
 
Excerpted from The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“Gracefully evocative … [Hirshfield’s] pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge...[her] contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a beautifully agile and sage volume.”— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
 
“An exquisite collection that displays her talents of observation and her willingness to look at life through the lens of hindsight.” —Anisse Gross, The San Francisco Gate
 
“Hirshfield’s new poems emerge as fiercely strong yet tender, drawing on supple intuition and clarifying intelligence to evoke the richness of her authentic inner life. Hirshfield sees beyond self, perceiving fresh perspectives flowing through our permeability and interconnection.” —Robert Bonazzi, World Literature Today
 
“The Beauty composes the ordinary fruit, in the ordinary kitchen, the ants, the towels, the hopes, the loss, the way we humans believe and lose faith, all of it contained in the hours of every single ordinary day, and renders it beautiful, noticeable.” —Kirsten Rian, The Oregonian

"Throughout The Beauty, her gracefully evocative eighth book of poems, Hirshfield is archly witty and riddling. In “My Skeleton,” for example, she offers a fresh and startling look at our relationship with our bodies, a subject rooted in her fascination with perception, science, and underlying structures of all kinds. Her succinct and arresting observations—often framed within such everyday moments as waking in the morning and sitting in a kitchen, and inspired by the subtle wonders of honey, cellophane, church bells, even the journey of a common cold—swerve suddenly and exhilaratingly onto metaphysical terrain. Her pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge: “Generation. / Strange word: both making and passing.” Hirshfield’s contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a
beautifully agile and sage volume."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield's eighth collection, reveals a poet at the height of her powers. With her signature use of deceptively simple images and language, she hints at the unspoken truths that lie just beyond our perspective while celebrating the everyday details and connections that make a life. . . While many of these poems are brief, they are masterpieces in miniature. Their images are simple but not obvious; they are offered without judgment. They also reward contemplation. Hirshfield asks her readers to wait for their own reactions, suggesting that those reactions matter because they open the door to the poem's meaning, and because they unite us all. --Jeanette Zwart, Shelf Awareness

A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
© Curt Richter
Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield's work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. View titles by Jane Hirshfield

About

An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices 

The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") offer an altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

Excerpt

My Eyes
 
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.
 
Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.
 
Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.
 
My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
 
_______
 
I Wake Early
 
I wake early,
make two cups of coffee,
drink one,
think, go back to sleep,
wake again, think,
drink the other.
 
To start a day over
is a card game played for no money,
a ripe tomato,
a swimming cat.
 
Time here:
lukewarm,
with milk and sugar,
big and unset as a table.
 
I wake twice.
 
Twice the window
unbroken, transparent.
 
Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.
Twice the war (my war)
is distant,
its children’s children are distant.
 
_______
 
 
Zero Plus Anything Is a World
 
Four less one is three.
 
Three less two is one.
 
One less three
is what, is who,
remains.
 
The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.
 
Recipe:
add salt to hunger.
 
Recipe:
add time to trees.
 
Zero plus anything
is a world.
 
This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each breath changed.
 
Recipe:
add death to life.
 
Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.
 
Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.
 
Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,
then another.
 
Excerpted from The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Reviews

“Gracefully evocative … [Hirshfield’s] pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge...[her] contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a beautifully agile and sage volume.”— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
 
“An exquisite collection that displays her talents of observation and her willingness to look at life through the lens of hindsight.” —Anisse Gross, The San Francisco Gate
 
“Hirshfield’s new poems emerge as fiercely strong yet tender, drawing on supple intuition and clarifying intelligence to evoke the richness of her authentic inner life. Hirshfield sees beyond self, perceiving fresh perspectives flowing through our permeability and interconnection.” —Robert Bonazzi, World Literature Today
 
“The Beauty composes the ordinary fruit, in the ordinary kitchen, the ants, the towels, the hopes, the loss, the way we humans believe and lose faith, all of it contained in the hours of every single ordinary day, and renders it beautiful, noticeable.” —Kirsten Rian, The Oregonian

"Throughout The Beauty, her gracefully evocative eighth book of poems, Hirshfield is archly witty and riddling. In “My Skeleton,” for example, she offers a fresh and startling look at our relationship with our bodies, a subject rooted in her fascination with perception, science, and underlying structures of all kinds. Her succinct and arresting observations—often framed within such everyday moments as waking in the morning and sitting in a kitchen, and inspired by the subtle wonders of honey, cellophane, church bells, even the journey of a common cold—swerve suddenly and exhilaratingly onto metaphysical terrain. Her pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature’s perpetual surge: “Generation. / Strange word: both making and passing.” Hirshfield’s contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a
beautifully agile and sage volume."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield's eighth collection, reveals a poet at the height of her powers. With her signature use of deceptively simple images and language, she hints at the unspoken truths that lie just beyond our perspective while celebrating the everyday details and connections that make a life. . . While many of these poems are brief, they are masterpieces in miniature. Their images are simple but not obvious; they are offered without judgment. They also reward contemplation. Hirshfield asks her readers to wait for their own reactions, suggesting that those reactions matter because they open the door to the poem's meaning, and because they unite us all. --Jeanette Zwart, Shelf Awareness

A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week

Author

© Curt Richter
Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of ten collections and is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on the craft of poetry, and edited and co-translated four books presenting world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield's work, which has been translated into seventeen languages, appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. View titles by Jane Hirshfield

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