Jane Hirshfield

cantfindit

Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and by The New York Times as “passionate and radiant,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time.  Her nine poetry books include  Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award,  The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded Poets For Science, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Bennington College, and elsewhere. Source

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

 

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

 

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

 

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

 

Let them not say:           they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

 

Let them say, as they must say something: 

 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.


Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Agency

Politics

Science & Climate

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Epistrophe

the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses

Hyperbaton

An inversion of typical syntax (word order).

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times