The Asking draws together a selection of previously published work along with new poems from one of American poetry’s foremost environmental advocates.
A visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human, Jane Hirshfield's poems are both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness.
The Asking includes work from her earlier retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005), as well as drawing upon four later collections, After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020), along with a selection of 31 new poems.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry and two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past. Her honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award. In the UK, her collection After, a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2016. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. She lives in northern California.
