Each Happiness Ringed by Lions

"Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives.

Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions in 2005, followed by After in 2006 (which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Come, Thief in 2011 and The Beauty in 2016.

‘Jane Hirshfield’s poems praise the ceaseless mutability of life as its central splendor…with habits of perception quite different from what our poetry customarily offers’ – William Matthews

‘Hirshfield’s lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious… Wittily deductive and metaphysically resplendent, Hirshfield’s supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence’ – Donna Seaman, Booklist"