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Ledger: Poems Paperback – September 7, 2021

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 190 ratings

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A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate—"Some of the most important poetry in the world today" (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine).


Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments.

They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty.

Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems by a "modern master" (
The Washington Post).
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In language of uncanny lyrical precision, Hirshfield's work redraws boundaries between the self and the natural world.” —Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe

“[Hirshfield] writes about what matters in the world . . . She is responsible with every word choice, every line a deliberate beat, each poem its own chrysalis of meaning . . . She gives you the observation of life as we’re all living it and the personal tragedy life entails, and then she slips in themes of planetary crisis. It’s the kind of gut punch good poems provide, the solid fist inside the velvet glove . . . This is a book to read front to back, then at random, then front to back again.”
—Elizabeth Crane, Vox

“A clear, steadying voice, and a firm reminder of the immensity and promise of one human life within the vast mystery of the world that holds it . . . [
Ledger] bears witness to Earth under duress—trees toppling, birds vanishing, oceans acidifying. But the poet holds no megaphone or manifesto. There’s a mournful quality to the work, a quiet and elegiac composure. The book is a ledger of loss and loss-to-come. Its subject is grim, but it is not a grim book. It’s a stirring call to action’s antecedent—awareness . . . For Hirshfield, every poem is a renewal of a lifelong intention to cultivate awareness.” —Colleen Morton Busch, Orion Magazine

“In her ninth book of poetry, Hirshfield, seeks to balance what we take with what we give, what we seek with what we find, what we observe with what we comprehend. In intimate poems of being, [she] poses meticulous equations of the self coping with doubt, hunger, age, and death. In equally balanced poems, she encompasses the ecological.
Ledger perfectly embodies Hirshfield’s carefully weighted tone as she reckons with our constant subtraction of Earth’s life forces and incessant addition of carbon to our atmosphere, acid to our seas . . . Hirshfield is tender, witty, philosophical, and clarion, knowing us to be creatures of yes and no, credits and debits. ‘We were our own future, / a furnace invented to burn itself up.’” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Few search-artists have served as greater agents of transmutation than Jane Hirshfield—a poet of optimism and of lucidity, a champion of science and an ordained Buddhist, a poet who could write 'So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance,' a poet who can balance and steady us against those times when we 'go to sleep in one world and wake in another' with her wondrous new collection, 
Ledger . . . this miraculous book . . . altogether re-saning.” —Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org

“Jane Hirshfield’s poems often feel like whole landscapes, graciously embracing the widest view and the tiniest sequins at once . . . Her longtime practice of Soto Zen Buddhism and her commitments to scientific knowledge and respect blend to create some of the most important poetry in the world today.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine

“Reading her work, I catch myself thinking that Hirshfield is the poet who orchestrates silences . . . It isn’t easy these days to find a poet who can do this while being also perfectly articulate and clear. Reading Hirshfield, I find myself coming back to Mahmoud Darwish’s idea that clarity is our ultimate mystery.” —Ilya Kaminsky, The Paris Review

“Intimate, tender free verse . . . Hirshfield perfectly captures our individual sense of lostness, faced with undeniable catastrophe, while invoking our collective responsibility.”
—Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

Ledger is a watershed . . . a culmination. [Hirshfield's] voice, always inclusive and generous, swells to new levels of relevance, revelation, and resonance in these pages . . . Many poems in Ledger feel eerily prescient about our current confinement, as in ‘Cataclysm’ when ‘fish unschool’ and ‘sheeps unflock to separately graze’ . . . Rather than give in to despair, these poems place their faith in simple perseverance, coupled with humble, personal action. They offer a larger, longer planetary perspective and provide the spiritual food needed to sustain the effort.”Rebecca Foust,Women’s Voices for Change

“A new volume of poems by acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield is an event. After reading the poems in Ledger—a capacious, varied volume—it seems as if ordinary life is richer and deeper than before . . . A Hirshfield poem is an exercise in opening the self . . . The value of such work is beyond question.” —Magdalena Kay, World Literature Today

“The vigilant, deeply observed poems in
Ledger are an antidote to collective blindness.” —Jessica Zack, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Hirshfield] understands the world in all its happiness, melancholy, unpleasant surprise and moments of resilience.” —Amy Bloom, The New York Times

“When a poet’s purpose is tied to our own fate, we tend to notice the poems more seriously because it’s not only the ‘dexterous pen and the beautiful hand,’ but a moral clarity we want . . . This happens while reading Hirshfield more than most . . . Writers are denizens of a complex world, figuring it out for us. They restore consciousness, rinse off language, and create a finer air. Hirshfield has done this for many years. Ledger continues that literary history. It is another invitation to find the many choices within ourselves.” —Grace Cavelieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books

“[Hirshfield’s] stark, powerful poems are crafted so simply they seem effortless. Constructed largely of nouns and verbs . . . it’s hard to understand how they manage to evoke such a range of emotion. And yet they do, with a voice that at times seems like an old-world prophet, at times like a Zen Master . . . What emerges as one reads this book is a sense of mourning for what’s lost, and a piercing delight in what is left. By calling attention to the facts and figures of loss, by offering up a reckoning, 
Ledger literally as well as figuratively reminds us of what counts.” — Meryl Natchez, ZYZZYVA

“Poet Jane Hirshfield fuses science, loss, and wonder in her new collection,
Ledger . . . A tender and fearsome accounting of how humans have used and abused the planet. The poems are infused with loss, bafflement, and possibility.” —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Open Notebook

“Hirshfield’s ability to distill a single image with vodka clarity is on full display in her ninth collection . . . Whatever exquisite form these poems take, they carry a haiku spirit.”
—Stephanie Pruitt-Gaines, BookPage

“Hirshfield tackles some of the biggest questions we face as living beings . . . Her poetry and essays move between scales vast and miniscule, balancing awe and mundanity, the out of the ordinary and the everyday.”—Marie Scarles, Tricycle

“Masterful . . . Hirshfield urges a reckoning of human influence on—and interference with—the planet . . . [Her] world is one filled with beauty, from the ‘generosity’ of grass to humanity’s connection to the muskrat. This is both a paean and a heartbreaking plea.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Zen poetry for a bleak era . . . An exploration of the capacity for life, its value and purpose . . . Hirshfield’s hand is deft . . . We look very closely at an object or statement before lifting it to discover what else it can tell us about ourselves; a light shined outward, then the camera angle shifts and the light is back on us . . . Hirshfield’s collection does exactly what we expect, and a little more—more of the personal, more of the contemporary world and its problems, more transcendence through art.”
 —Genevieve Walker, San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry and have been finalists for The National Book Critics Circle Award and England's T. S. Eliot Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, and she presents her work at literary and interdisciplinary events worldwide. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California, she is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; Reprint edition (September 7, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1524711713
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1524711719
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.99 x 0.36 x 8.9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 190 ratings

About the author

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Jane Hirshfield
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Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including THE ASKING: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Knopf, 2023), LEDGER (Knopf, 2020); THE BEAUTY (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015; COME, THIEF (Knopf, 2011); AFTER (HarperCollins, 2006), named a Best Book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times, and a finalist for England's prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT, finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; THE LIVES OF THE HEART; THE OCTOBER PALACE; OF GRAVITY & ANGELS, winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; and ALAYA.

Hirshfield is the author as well of two now-classic essay collections, NINE GATES: ENTERING THE MIND OF POETRY (HarperCollins, 1997) and TEN WINDOWS: HOW GREAT POEMS TRANSFORM THE WORLD (Knopf, 2015). Her bestselling THE HEART OF HAIKU, an Amazon Kindle Single exploring the essence of haiku and its 17th-century founding poet, Matsuo Basho, was named both a "Best Kindle Single" and an Amazon Best Book of 2011.

Hirshfield has additionally edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the past: THE INK DARK MOON: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Vintage Classics, 1990), WOMEN IN PRAISE OF THE SACRED: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (HarperCollins, 1994), and, with Robert Bly, MIRABAI: ECSTATIC POEMS (Beacon Press, 2004).

Hirshfield's honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University's Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California's California Book Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Orion, ten volumes of The Best American Poetry (including the 25th anniversary Best of the Best American Poetry volume), and many other publications. Her work has been featured numerous times on national public radio, and she appears in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and also named the third recipient of the Donald Hall--Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. In 2019 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Hirshfield's work has been called "passionate and radiant" by the New York Times Book Review, and described by the San Francisco Chronicle as evidencing "the grasp of a master" and "filled with somber, judiciously lit treasures." A starred review in Booklist describes "poems of exquisite restraint and meticulous reasoning," while a British magazine, Agenda, states, "The poems' realized ambition is wisdom." The Washington Post describes Hirshfield as taking her place in the "pantheon of modern masters." Never a full-time academic, Hirshfield has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and elsewhere, a member of the Bennington College MFA faculty, and was the 2022 Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queens University, Belfast. She has appeared widely at writers conferences, literary centers, and festivals both in this country and abroad. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages, and her books have appeared on bestseller lists in San Francisco, Detroit, Canberra, and Krakow.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953 and was a member of the first graduating class at Princeton University to include women. After graduating, she did a year of farm labor in New Jersey before travelling slowly west in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains, sleeping as often as possible by creeks in national forests. She studied Soto Zen intensively for eight years, including three years in monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the wilderness inland from Big Sur, and received lay ordination in 1979. She has cooked at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, driven 18-wheel truck, worked as the independent editor of several books that have sold in the millions, and spent four years living without electricity. In recent years she has become increasingly engaged in the dialogue between poetry and science. She has been poet in residence for both a neuroscience program at UCSF and an experimental forest in Oregon, and in 2017, she read a poem on the Washington Mall at the first March for Science, to an audience of 40-50,000 people. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in a small white house surrounded by fruit trees, a vegetable garden, lavender, and roses.

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Customers say

Customers praise the poetry for its stunning and lyrical style. They find the content rich and excellent, with an intelligent overview of science and climate concerns. The book is described as medicine for pandemic-anxious souls, bringing joy and calm.

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13 customers mention "Poetry quality"13 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the poetry quality. They find it stunning and timely, with a deft lyrical touch. Some readers find some poems abstract or cryptic, while others describe them as lovely, accessible, and arresting. The poems are described as echolocations of volcanic eruptions.

"...Great poetry is seldom topical--the terms contradict each other. But these poems are as present as they are universal and surely abiding...." Read more

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

"I love Jane Hirsfield; she is is an amazing poet of our time. I cannot believe I got a Firth’s edition hardback...." Read more

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

3 customers mention "Content quality"3 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the content quality. They find it a rich collection and an excellent new collection from an outstanding poet.

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

"What an excellent new collection from an outstanding poet...." Read more

"...for the pandemic-anxious soul and call to action in a compact and rich collection..." Read more

3 customers mention "Knowledge level"3 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's knowledge level. They mention a deep understanding of science and a poet/artist's eye for nature. The intelligent overview with respect for climate concerns is appreciated. The book speaks to them as amateur naturalists, human beings, scientists, biophiles, and fans of stars.

"...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...." Read more

"...They speak to me as an amateur naturalist, human being, scientist, biophile, and fan of stars, planets, rocks, and clouds...." Read more

"An intelligent overview with respect for our critical climate concerns shaped into poems by The brilliant craft of jane hirshfield." Read more

3 customers mention "Medicine value"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book helpful for overcoming anxiety and confusion. They say it brings joy and calm.

"...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...." Read more

"...of it, as it's such a personal expression, but it certainly brought me joy and calm...." Read more

"Balm for the pandemic-anxious soul and call to action in a compact and rich collection..." Read more

Balm for the pandemic-anxious soul and call to action in a compact and rich collection
5 out of 5 stars
Balm for the pandemic-anxious soul and call to action in a compact and rich collection
I have been so enthralled with Ledger, and so moved by the poems, that I am still only halfway through the collection, because I am rationing myself to at most 2 per day. They speak to me as an amateur naturalist, human being, scientist, biophile, and fan of stars, planets, rocks, and clouds. So perfect to have this right now, and my only sadness is that the collection is finite.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2020
    Hirshfield’s, Ledger, arrives at the moment when:

    "You go to sleep in one world and wake in another."
    Jane Hirshfield, from LEDGER

    Poem 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.
    16 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2020
    "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."
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2020
    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.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2023
    Thank you Jane for this beautiful and meaningful collection. It is a gift to us all.
  • Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2023
    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.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2020
    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.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2022
    Some poems are strong, others are too abstract, cryptic for me.
  • Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2023
    Jane Hirshfield’s Ledger: Poems is well worth the swim! The calm water beckons smashing questions just what a little soul believes. Words take image as black dots of North Pacific salmon splashing
    the bend of light folding intoxicant scent. Her poems are echolocations of volcanic eruptions all the ash adhering to your body.