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[APPLAUSE]

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Good evening.

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Welcome to the Poetry
Center, and thank

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you so much for being here.

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It is my great
pleasure, and true honor

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tonight to introduce the
award winning poet, essayist

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and translator Jane Hirshfield.

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She is the author of
10 poetry collections,

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including "Ledger," "The
Beauty," "Come, Thief,"

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and "Given Sugar, Given Salt."

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We're very excited to
hear her read tonight

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from her upcoming
10th collection,

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The Asking: New
and Selected Poems,

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which will be out
this September,

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and is available
by pre-order now.

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Hirshfield is also the
author of two exquisite essay

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collections, Nine
Gates: Entering

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The Mind Of Poetry
and 10 Windows:

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How Great Poems
Transformed The World.

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She's also edited and
co-translated three books

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collecting the work of
women poets from the past,

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an anthology with Robert
Bly and The Heart of Haiku,

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a book that explores
the essence of haiku,

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and its seventh century,
17th century founding

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poet, Matsuo Bashō.

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Her many awards
include fellowships

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from the National Endowment
of the Arts, the Rockefeller

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Foundation, the Academy
of American Poets,

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and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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She'll be reading tonight from
a range of work over time,

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including The Ink
Dark Moon, her co

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translation of two
foremost women poets

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of classical age Japan.

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Poems written 1,000 years ago.

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And some new poems from The
Asking: New and Selected Poems,

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which draws from her previously
published books of poetry,

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most recently The
Beauty and Ledger.

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It's really a
thrilling reading list.

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Hirshfield's poems flourish
in the liminal space

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where scientific inquiry,
empathetic knowing,

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aesthetic experiment, and
astute observation meet.

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A poem about the
dwindling numbers

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of Siberian tigers
and red legged egrets

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juxtaposes the sound of heavy
furniture being moved upstairs.

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A symbol of extinction's
invisible yet oppressive

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weight.

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Doubt, hunger, and
longing are interrogated

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as intimate companions.

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Rapture and paradox
are inextricably linked

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in a poem of bells tolling
on All Souls' Day in Italy.

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Slipping easily between the
intimacy of the quotidian,

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and the expansiveness
of the philosophical,

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Hirshfield's poems seek to house
a world in which perception

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can be delicately distilled.

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Where the surreal can
flash with clarity.

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Where the luminous carries
undercurrents of anguish,

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and where the precision
of observation

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is held in tender awareness
with the imprecision

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of human nature.

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Nobel laureate
Czeslaw Milosz wrote

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of Hirshfield's profound
empathy for the suffering

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of all living beings.

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And indeed we see
Hirshfield's poems

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grapple with the powers
of poetic imagination,

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as well as the realization
of the human capacity

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for both profound connection
and ecological destruction.

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The poet Jules
Supervielle once wrote

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about decanting his
deepest poetry only

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by dint of simplicity
and transparency,

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seeing to it that
the ineffable becomes

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familiar at the same time it
guards its fabulous origins.

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Like Supervielle, Hirshfield
makes use of poetry's seeing.

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Her poems are luminous
windows and gates,

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and doors, which peering
through or stepping into,

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one can encounter a thrumming
vibrant communicative

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intelligence.

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They are modes of inquiry,
invested in possibilities

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and awakening perception.

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They invite us to notice our
entanglements with one another,

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and with the species around us.

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They call us to think, feel,
and imagine more expansively.

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Please join me in welcoming
the visionary Jane Hirshfield.

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[APPLAUSE]