Ten Windows
How Great Poems Transform the World
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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. 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.
Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bashō, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among many others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry’s world-making takes place: word by charged word. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hirshfield, a poet and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, ponders the value and function of poetry in 10 insightful essays. Following up on her earlier nonfiction book Nine Gates, Hirshfield delves into various works written across multiple styles and centuries. She begins with a perceptive lesson about the way a poet and a poem sees the world, later exploring the theme of "the hidden," referring to both subterranean layers of meaning in a piece of writing and the protective concealments common in nature, in which, according to a biologist, "hiddenness is the default." Elsewhere, Hirshfield shows how asking questions about poems, from Basho's haiku to Walt Whitman's American epics, can lead to answers about ourselves. In this vein, she tackles "American-ness" as it's manifested in modern American poetry, concluding that our "culture created by immigration, by mobility of psyche and of body." Hirshfield writes with a poet's voice and imparts wisdom on nearly every page. In a particularly lucid selection, "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise," she explains how important it is that poetry transcend reason, because reason "cannot and does not encompass the whole of life." Hirshfield's in-depth tour of poetry and art leaves a lasting impression.
