Jane Hirshfield - Ledger: Poems

From one of our most celebrated contemporary poets—internationally renowned, long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T.S. Eliot Prize, named “among the modern masters” (The Washington Post)—comes Jane Hirshfield‘s Ledger, her most important work yet.

From its already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments, and call us to action.

They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate.

They consider “the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap,” recognize the intimacy of interconnection (“lichens, burdocks, mycelial mats between trees– / forgive this hubris”), and apply the lever of questions (“How came separation to chisel, / to cherish, to chafe?”) by which we might begin to find a way forward.

Finally, it is the human spirit and words themselves–loyal instruments of recognition, humility, and praise–that triumph in this stunning accounting by an essential poet.