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[aaknopf]

The Asking: New and Selected Poems covers half a century's poetry-making by Jane Hirshfield, who shapes whole worlds of feeling—and moves between idea and image—with startling economy.

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower its long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift its head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Asking by Jane Hirshfield.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield and follow her @janehirshfield on Facebook.

Click here to see a recording of Jane Hirshfield deliver this year's annual Blaney Lecture for the Academy of American Poets, "Making the Invisible Visible." [link will be available after March 19]. Jane will give the keynote speech at The Sierra Poetry Festival in Nevada City, CA on April 13 and will hold a conversation on climate change at the Tiburon Public Library with Science Friday host Ira Flatow in Tiburon, CA on April 19 at 6:30 PM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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#poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopfpoetry #HirshfieldAudio #poems #knopf poetry #the asking #jane hirshfield #poem #to drink

[aaknopf]

Today, a poem from Jane Hirshfield’s collection Come, Thief (2011). As a poet of profound attentiveness to her surroundings, Hirshfield has kept her eye trained on the underlying mathematics—the facts we can see and account for—as well as on the movements of spirit and beauty that live invisibly within.

First Light Edging Cirrus

1025 molecules are enough to call wood thrush or apple. A hummingbird, fewer. A wristwatch: 1024. An alphabet’s molecules, tasting of honey, iron, and salt, cannot be counted— as some strings, untouched, sound when a near one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us. It looked out face to face in every direction. Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield, including her recent collection, Ledger.

Hear Jane Hirshfield read her poetry on April 13 (The LOGOS Collective), April 26 (Terrain.org), and April 29 (Northshire Books).

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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#HirshfieldAudio #Jane Hirshfield #Poetry #Knopf Poetry #First Light Edging Cirrus #Come thief #poem #poetry knopf #poem-a-day

[aaknopf]

Poetry month is here, and we are committed to delivering daily poems to your inbox throughout April. We hope they provide some comfort and food for thought at a difficult time. We begin with Jane Hirshfield, among the most powerful current voices addressing the crises of climate and shared fate. "The Bowl," a poem suddenly meaningful in new ways, speaks of accepting whatever the day brings us as sustenance, then accepting whatever the next day brings. It appears in Hirshfield's new collection Ledger, a book calling us to honor our unbreakable connections to each other and to the earth these poems find fragile, fragrant, and unbounded.

The Bowl

If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.

If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.

If a shoe is put into the bowl,

the leather is chewed and chewed over,

a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.

A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.

Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,

it eats them.

Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.

The bowl cannot be thrown away.

It cannot be broken.

It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,

and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.

Hands with ten fingers,

fifty-four bones,

capacities strange to us almost past measure.

Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—

with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.

More on this book and author:

Visit Knopf’s Instagram today, and all throughout April, to view poets reading from their work — our first Story, of Jane Hirshfield reading another poem from Ledger, is up now!

Learn more about Ledger by Jane Hirshfield.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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#hirshfieldaudio #jane hirshfield #ledger #knopf poetry #poetry #poem-a-day #poetry month

[aaknopf]

The boundlessness (and the limitations) of consciousness is one of Jane Hirshfield’s great subjects. This poem is from The Beauty, her latest collection; a new book, entitled Ledger, will appear next spring.

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

I found myself suddenly voluminous, three-dimensioned, a many-roofed building in moonlight. Thought traversed me as simply as moths might. Feelings traversed me as fish. I heard myself thinking, It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears. Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace, the usual footsteps above me. Washed my face again with hot water, as I did when I was a child.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Beauty

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield

Hear Jane Hirshfield read from her work on April 6 in Huntington Station, NY, and on April 23 in Northampton, MA

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link

#poetry #Knopf Poetry #Poem-A-Day #National Poetry Month #Jane Hirshfield #Many-Roofed Building in Midnight #women writeres #The Beauty #Hirshfieldaudio

[aaknopf]

In one of the essays in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Jane Hirshfield writes, "Every poem—every work of art—is a kind of window: art is a way to release our attention from immediacy's grip into gestures that encompass, draw from, and remind of more expansive constellations and connection. . . . Sometimes the changed awareness is simply the knowledge that a different relationship to experience might be possible." In "My Luck," she finds the proverbial penny and opens just such a window.

My Luck

My luck lay in the road copper side up and copper side down It shone I passed it by I turned around I picked it up I shook my beggar’s cup quite full I left it there to be refound I bent down and I unbent up copper side down copper side up between the air and ground left there picked up My luck

More on these books and author:

Learn more about Jane Hirshfield's Come, Thief and Ten Windows.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield.

See Jane read from her work on April 15in Berkeley, April 17 in Boston, April 18 and April 20 in Princeton, and April 30in Sacramento.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#hirshfieldaudio #jane hirshfield #poetry #national poetry month #poetry month 2018