Jane Hirshfield is a poet, essayist, and translator whose poetry collections include Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; After, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and named “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post and others; and most recently, The Asking. She is also the author of two 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 collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon; Women in Praise of the Sacred; Mirabai; and The Heart of Haiku. Her recognitions include Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Hall-Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2004, Jane was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. And in 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In the summer,
I took the wool blanket off the bedding.
In winter, I put it back on.
A single wool blanket,
plaid, of blue wool, red wool,
and black, with a little yellow.
In a world of summer and winter grasses,
of sheep, of wool, of weavers.
In a world where cries
of a goshawk in June, of crows in December.
What world was it.
Tell me.
What world,
in which some could so easily
do this—
add a blanket, subtract one—
and some could not do this.
We slept in it, math-less,
ate as we could of its berries and meats.
Wanting to live.
Betrothed, bewildered mammals,
beheld & beholding, bequeathed of existence.
Reflecting a world where snow no longer arrives, annual migrations fall out of time, yet first blossoms still burst, Seasons, our sixth print edition, moves through three themes: requiem, invitation, and celebration—each a contemplation on the paradoxical ways the seasons now beckon us into intimate relationship.
