Nine Gates

<p><strong>"With the exactitude of a surgeon and the sensuous attention of a chef, Hirshfield addresses, essay by essay, the art, craft, and act of making poetry . . . These essays are both brilliantly ambitious</strong>—<strong>one random passage in her last piece, on 'writing and the threshold life,' flows 14th-century Japanese poet Ono no Komachi (whose poems she has translated in the past) into Czeslaw Milosz into Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman</strong>—<strong>and confidently clear." — <em>Village Voice</em></strong></p><p><strong>Nine essays on the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives, from esteemed poet and thinker Jame Hirshfield. </strong></p><p><em>Nine Gates</em> begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, <em>Nine Gates</em> illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.</p><p>Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. <em>Nine Gates</em> is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world: alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.</p><p>In part a primer for the general reader,<em> Nine Gates </em>is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, <em>Nine Gates</em> is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.</p>