Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield (2022)

“The work of poets is to take what is almost unsayable of grief, beauty and our human, shared fates, and somehow bring them into words, that may hold their recognitions in forms retrievable, useful, and moving.

Having known Seamus Heaney long as a poet whose work made my own life larger, and then as a friend - we met first in Krakow in 2000, at a millennial festival of world poets, and then in Dublin, San Francisco, and Rome - I'm profoundly honored to be coming to Belfast to hold the Center's visiting position created in his memory. To be able to walk this city of poets and poems, of mutual inhabitance whose sharing informs my own- feels an invitation of immeasurable proportion.”

Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. She is described as writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to The New York Times and as “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post.

A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Poets For Science, Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including most recently Ledger (Knopf/Bloodaxe, 2020). Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award and named “best book of the year” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times; After (2006) was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Award, and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Asking: New & Selected Poems will appear in 2023 (Knopf, US) and 2024 (Bloodaxe Books, UK).

Hirshfield is the author as well of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry's infrastructure and craft, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and editor and co-translator of four books presenting the work of world poets from the deep past. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The TLS, The Guardian, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been translated into over fifteen languages. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.