9780060553661

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In her fourth volume of poetry, Jane Hirshfield illuminates the many lives of the heart as it makes its difficult passage through inner and outer worlds. The book opens with a series of muscular imaginations of the heart in conjunction with outer forms -- a mule, salt, two forgotten monks of the Sung dynasty, a museum display of ancient iron cauldrons. It continues with a wide array of meditations: upon the god of Not-Yet; the idea of invention; a snowplow driver envisioned as a medieval scribe; the wisdom of the placid; and the spirits of awakening, sleep, birth, illness and departure.Throughout these pages, horses, fish, raccoons and maples hold essential knowledge, inhabiting the shapes of necessary fortitude and unavoidable loss, of separation and wholeness, of passion's stubborn continuance and the transient gift of grace. Working within a range of formal approaches, Hirshfield never loses sight of the core work of the lyric poem: to provide an ever deepening and widening sense of what it is to be awake to the deep currents of our daily life.Every good poem Hirshfield has written, creates the portrait of a state of soul. In The Lives of the Heart, she brings to the lyric the sure and luminous brush of a poet working at full power, capturing and extending our knowledge of the self and the world.Praise for The October Palace"A radiant and passionate collection." --New York Times Book Review"Hirshfield's verbal power lies in a stunning physicality and the seductively rich music that such physicality engenders.... [She] writes for readers who have lived a little -- that is to say, a lot; who have lost, and grieved, and know how painful the capacity to love can be." --Hungry Mind Review"Deeply grounded in nature and the everyday, these attentive, imagistically precise, celebratory poems reveal the interconnections between interior and exterior worlds."--Women's Review of BooksOf Gravity & Angels "Concrete and wedded to the tactile world, these poems give off an otherworldly beauty and resonance."--San Francisco Chronicle"Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. She doesn't try to discard the tradition, but to draw from and extend it. Her poems are meant to endure." --Antioch Review

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