The October Palace

(Paperback)

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Description

Grounded in a series of mediations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world, Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain.

Reviews

"An exquisite accomplishment. These serene and painterly meditations quietly blossom into luminous and sensual lyric reckonings." -- David St. John

"A radiant and passionate collection." -- New York Times Book Review

"Hirshfield's new collection shows her distinctive imagination, clearly nourished by serious commitment to the practice of Buddhist mediation but by no means narrow in range. I enjoy her attentiveness, the concrete details and musicality of her images, and the way abstract and concrete interweave in illumination throughout her work. The October Palace is a book to welcome and often return to." -- Denise Levertov

"The prevailing emotional tone in our poetry is elegiac: the lament, doubtless spiced by fear, is for the speed and relentlessness of change. But Jane Hirshfield's poems praise the ceaseless mutability of life as its central splendor. Thus her poems, with their rare combination of grace and velocity, offer us not only their own considerable pleasures, but habits of perception quite different from what our poetry customarily offers." -- William Matthews

Author Bio

The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England"s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.