Published in 1988
71 pages
Jane Hirshfield‘s first book, Alaya, received the Quarterly Review Of Literature Prize in 1982. In 1986, Of Gravity Angels received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation for a book in progress; in 1989, it was awarded the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal. Hirshfield’s third book The October Palace, published in 1994, received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the Poetry Center Book Award. She has also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1988) and edited Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). Hirshfield’s other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockerfeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco and lives in Mill Valley, California.
What is this book about?
Jane Hirshfield’s is a brave, new voice that, finding itself in its first volume, now goes on to ever more searching music. Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized. —Theodore Weiss
