Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.74 (862 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0385351054 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-02-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
This thrilling work of immense value is truly an important book on one of the most important subjects: poetry. Reading her is reminiscent of the joy found among the insights and illuminations of Hugh Kenner’s best work . —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) . Hirshfield writes brilliantly of paradox in poetry, of what poets and stand-up comics have in common, and how poetry “counters isolation and meaninglessness.” The profound pleasure Hirshfield takes in delineating poetry’s efficacy makes for a beautifully enlightening volume. However
Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, ,and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. S. JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and <
By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible. Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged.. Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bash, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among many others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry’s world-making takes place: word by charged word. Investigating the power of poetry to move and change us becomes in these pages an equal investigation into the inhabitance and navigation of our human lives. A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and essayist “Poetry,” Jane Hirshfield has said, “is language that foments revolutions of being.” In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds and explores some of the ways this is done—by the inclusion of hiddenness, paradox, and surprise; by a perennial awareness of the place of uncertainty in our lives; by language’s own acts of discovery; by the powers of image, statement, music, and feeling to enlarge in every direction. The lucid understandings presented here are gripping and transformative in themselves
For lovers of poetry, this is a must read. Hirshfield's writing about poetry is as insightful, precise, and deep as her poetry. I have long been fascinated by her vision of what poetry is about, what it is for, how it works. I had long thought of Archibald MacLeish's dictum, "A poem should not mean/But be" as a kind of final, complete statement. But Hirshfield takes that much further, into "be what?" Poetry is not, as MacLeish pointed out, a vessel . Five Stars Bob Layton The is an excellent follow up to her book - 9 Gates.. Writing that speaks to life. Poetry itself speaks to life, to how we live in the face of inevitable death, change, and transformation. Writing *about* poetry, however, often speaks to to what, exactly? Pedantry, fuss, and obscurity? Jane Hirshfield knows the real guts and soul of poetry; she is first and foremost a poet, one who deserves the awards and accolades she wins. Her perspective on the practices of making and reading poems is