Jane Hirshfield

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Nick Rozsa

A close-up of Jane Hirshfield.

Jane Hirshfield

Renowned poet Jane Hirshfield — a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets who was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019 — is stopping in Madison to discuss and read from The Asking, her hefty collection of new and selected poems dating back to 1971. Her work ranges from considering the life of a small ant at the start of the COVID-19 shutdown to the utter vastness of time, and she’s a leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination. This event is presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and it is free but registration is required at nelson.wisc.edu.

media release: Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.

In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection—drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing—brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.

With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.