Come, Thief

Jane Hirshfield

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780370620
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems in 2005, followed by After in 2006, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her latest collection, Come, Thief, centres on the beauty and fragility of our lives, touching on love, science, ageing and mortality, war and the political, the revelatory daily object, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each facet of our lives its transformative portrait, its particular memorable, singing and singular name. 'Hirshfield's lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious… Wittily deductive and metaphysically resplendent, Hirshfield's supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence' - Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Come, Thief. 'Come, Thief is a book of silences… a deep well full of strength and wisdom' - Dana Jennings, New York Times. 'Come, Thief is as much the accomplishment of a life in poetry as it is of a life given to inner investigation of what it means to be a human being' - Afaa M. Weaver, Orion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• French Horn
• First Light Edging Cirrus
• The Decision
• Vinegar and Oil
• The Tongue Says Loneliness
• Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection
• Critique of Pure Reason
• Narrowness
• These Also Once under Moonlight
• ‘Distance Makes Clean’
• Of Yield and Abandon
• The Conversation
• Perishable, It Said
• Fourth World
• Bruises
• The Pear
• Alzheimer’s
• Heat and Desperation
• Left-Handed Sugar
• The Promise
• Red Wine Is Fined by Adding Broken Eggshells
• The Lost Love Poems of Sappho
• Building and Earthquake
• Each We Call Fate
• The Visible Heat
• Sometimes the Heart Is a Shallow Autumn River
• Love in August
• Two Rains
• Washing Doorknobs
• Chapel
• Tolstoy and the Spider
• For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witch’s Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen
• Sweater
• Seawater Stiffens Cloth
• The Inventive, Visible Hobbles
• ‘Haofon Rece Swealg’
• Shadow: An Assay
• The Question
• All Day the Difficult Waiting
• Wild Plum
• Sheep
• The Dark Hour
• Everything Has Two Endings
• Protractor
• The Present
• It Must Be Leaves
• Haibun: A Mountain Rowboat
• Green-Striped Melons
• China
• Come, Thief
• Sentencings
• If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes
• Izmir
• A Blessing for Wedding
• Fifteen Pebbles
• The Kind Man
• All the Difficult Hours and Minutes
• Rain Thinking
• Invitation
• Contentment
• The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life
• Three-Legged Blues
• A Roomless Door
• A Small-Sized Mystery
• Bamboo
• A Day Is Vast
• A Thought
• Pompeii
• One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another
• Stone and Knife
• Suitcase
• My Luck
• A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes
• I Ran Out Naked in the Sun
• When Your Life Looks Back
• The Supple Deer
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• About the Author
• Copyright