Ledger: Poems Hardcover – March 10, 2020

Thank you Jane for this beautiful and meaningful collection. It is a gift to us all.

I don't read poetry. Ever. Still... this book, I loved it!Pretty sure I didn't understand all of it, as it's such a personal expression, but it certainly brought me joy and calm.It is a book to be read slowly - maybe a couple of pages a day was fine for me, just to let the words sink in. I feel confident I'll read it again soon.

I love Jane Hirsfield; she is is an amazing poet of our time. I cannot believe I got a Firth’s edition hardback. I now have he last three collections in hardback fort edition. The poems in Ledger are as imaging as her other works, if not more so. I’m sad that her reading tour has been canceled due to COVID-19, but she is doing remote readings. All one has to do is Google for them and scroll around to find them. I have gotten the paperback and the kindle edition. I love that publishers have figured out a way to make poetry collections into e- books; now I can highlight lines and make comments as I read along instead of using a notebook to do so. And I have the ability to extract my highlights and notes into a notebook I have on my Mac and it has all the identification for them so I may go back to them. The paperback is one I carry along with me when I’m out and about.

"I wanted to be surprised. To such a request, the world is obliging..."This is the title and opening line of the second poem in "Ledger" and it applies equally to my surprise and delight at the poems in this volume, which arrived today, and to the "interesting times" this book has been born into. Jane Hirshfield's poetry is profoundly rooted in her years of meditation practice and zen buddhism, yoked to a deep knowledge of science and a poet/artist's eye for the natural world.This book is important medicine for the confusion and fear that all of us are confronting during this pandemic, and i wish it well, knowing that Ms. Hirshfield has undoubtedly had to forgo the usual book tours and other events that accompany a book launch. But nobody better understands the need to look the present moment unflinchingly and lovingly in the eye. As she writes in the final poem of this volume: this is "the debt that is owed to the real."

A ledger records the pluses and minuses of a transaction, of life. Our ledger is with Mother Nature, as these lovely, accessible, yet arresting poems attest.Nature is always present in these poems, as beauty, as consolation. But the other side of the ledger is here too, where human folly drives nature, now poised to disappear with an evanescence that shrinks the heart. Science is present in these poems, making a judgment that permits no appeal.Great poetry is seldom topical--the terms contradict each other. But these poems are as present as they are universal and surely abiding. At least two of them, "Let Them Not Say" and "The Fifth Day" have found a long and vital life across the Internet as ordinary people have responded to their profound truth.Own this book. It will offer consolation even as it stares unblinkingly at both sides of the ledger.

Whenever I read one of Jane Hirschfield’s poems, I feel somehow larger when I finish it. No, my waist is not bloated — I don’t need poetry to accomplish that trick. Lame attempts at humor aside, is that my place in this ever-strange world is considerably grander, more deserving of kindness, and more grateful for the mysteries that make it all so damned worthwhile. And the truly remarkable thing here is that these are never ponderous options. “Ledger” manages to be fun — and sad and solemn, quiet and boisterous — at just the right times, and in just the right measure. Who are we? What toasts our souls and butters our imaginations? Ask me again these questions in a few years. Maybe, with luck, I will have savored these masterful poems long and deep, and grow large enough to venture an answer..

Hirshfield’s, Ledger, arrives at the moment when:"You go to sleep in one world and wake in another." Jane Hirshfield, from LEDGERPoem after poem provides light...a heightened awareness of the moment, calmly noting latitude and longitude, while navigating churning waters. We are here -- to varying degrees -- by our own doing, and there is much to pay; these are tipping points recorded.My habit is to open a book of poetry randomly, as I did with Ledger. I landed on the poem, My Dignity. I closed the book and sat with that poem for a day, so rich it is. To give voice to something worn lightly and held dear...to be aware of the fact that for the time being it’s yours to hold...well.

Some poems are strong, others are too abstract, cryptic for me.