Come, Thief

by Hirshfield, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780307595423
• ISBN10: 0307595420
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-23
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield joins the Knopf poetry list with an exquisite collection of poems that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence time cannot help but steal from us. Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into the moment and exchange something of herself with its finite music-and then, in simple, inevitable-seeming words, to deliver that exchange to us in poems that vibrate with form and expression perfectly united. In this book we encounter the stealth of feeling#x19;s arrival (#x1C;as some strings, untouched, / sound when a near one is speaking. / So it was when love slipped inside us#x1D;), an anatomy of solitude (#x1C;wrong solitude vinegars the soul, / right solitude oils it#x1D;), a reflection on the term #x1C;perishable#x1D; and the sweetness that transience invites into our midst (#x1C;How suddenly then / the strange happiness took me, / like a man with strong hands and strong mouth#x1D;). To read a Hirshfield poem is to find our own feelings eloquently ensnared. Love in August White moths against the screen in August darkness. Some clamor in envy. Some spread large as two hands of a thief Who wants to put back in your cupboard the long-taken silver.