The Asking New and Selected Poems

A long-awaited New and Selected collection by an iconic poet of global standing, assaying the full ranges of our shared and borrowed lives: our bonds of eros and our responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, recognized in these poems as abidingly dazzling, “even now, even here.”

The Asking takes its title from the closing line of one of its newly appearing poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet          didn’t it give you the asking.” In its substantial section of new work, Jane Hirshfield continues her signature affirmation of the central contradictions, uncertainties, and harvests of astonishment that shape our human lives. A forefront spokesperson for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, Hirshfield offers, as indispensable compass, the choice to embrace what comes. In poems of the smallest ant and the vastness of time, of hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, these pages—drawn from nine books and five decades of writing—bring the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poems: through questioning arc, tact, a looking both close and sweeping; through music-inflected pondering, recombinatory leap.
    In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. Interrogating language itself, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield invites shimmering truths into black ink. With quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarity, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the abiding possibility for repair.

JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of nine books of poetry, including, most recently Ledger. She is also the author of two collections of essays and has edited and co-translated four books. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and have been finalists for The National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and Poetry, among other places. A resident of Northern California, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.