Ledger: Poems

Product Description
A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate—"Some of the most important poetry in the world today" (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine).
Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the 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.
They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and 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 intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty.
Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a "modern master" (
The Washington Post).
Review
“In language of uncanny lyrical precision, Hirshfield's work redraws boundaries between the self and the natural world.”
—Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe
“[Hirshfield] writes about what matters in the world . . . She is responsible with every word choice, every line a deliberate beat, each poem its own chrysalis of meaning . . . She gives you the observation of life as we’re all living it and the personal tragedy life entails, and then she slips in themes of planetary crisis. It’s the kind of gut punch good poems provide, the solid fist inside the velvet glove . . . This is a book to read front to back, then at random, then front to back again.”
—Elizabeth Crane, Vox
“A clear, steadying voice, and a firm reminder of the immensity and promise of one human life within the vast mystery of the world that holds it . . . [
Ledger] bears witness to Earth under duress—trees toppling, birds vanishing, oceans acidifying. But the poet holds no megaphone or manifesto. There’s a mournful quality to the work, a quiet and elegiac composure. The book is a ledger of loss and loss-to-come. Its subject is grim, but it is
not a grim book. It’s a stirring call to action’s antecedent—awareness . . . For Hirshfield, every poem is a renewal of a lifelong intention to cultivate awareness.”
—Colleen Morton Busch, Orion Magazine
“In her ninth book of poetry, Hirshfield, seeks to balance what we take with what we give, what we seek with what we find, what we observe with what we comprehend. In intimate poems of being, [she] poses meticulous equations of the self coping with doubt, hunger, age, and death. In equally balanced poems, she encompasses the ecological.
Ledger perfectly embodies Hirshfield’s carefully weighted tone as she reckons with our constant subtraction of Earth’s life forces and incessant addition of carbon to our atmosphere, acid to our seas . . . Hirshfield is tender, witty, philosophical, and clarion, knowing us to be creatures of yes and no, credits and debits. ‘We were our own future, / a furnace invented to burn itself up.’”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Few search-artists have served as greater agents of transmutation than Jane Hirshfield—a poet of optimism and of lucidity, a champion of science and an ordained Buddhist, a poet who could write 'So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance,' a poet who can balance and steady us against those times when we 'go to sleep in one world and wake in another' with her wondrous new collection,
Ledger . . . this miraculous book . . . altogether re-saning.” —
Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org
“Jane Hirshfi