Introduction

The Asking draws together a selection of previously published work along with new poems from one of American poetry’s foremost environmental advocates.

A visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human, Jane Hirshfield's poems are both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness.

The Asking includes work from her earlier retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (2005), as well as drawing upon four later collections, After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020), along with a selection of 31 new poems.