Ten windows: how great poems transform the world, paperback/jane hirshfield

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and popular essayist -Poetry, - Jane Hirshfield has said, -is language that foments revolutions of being.

- In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds some of the ways this is done--by the inclusion of hiddenness, paradox, and surprise; by a perennial awareness of the place of uncertainty in our lives; by languages own acts of discovery; by the powers of image, statement, music, and feeling to enlarge in every direction.

Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bash , Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among others, Hirshfield reveals how poetrys world-making takes place: word by charged word.

By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible.

Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged.