The author also gratefully acknowledges the following publications for reprinting poems in this book that first appeared elsewhere: divide, Island (Australia), Island (Scotland), Poetry Daily (website: www.poems.com), Shambhala Sun, The Stony Thursday Book (Ireland), Tricycle, and Urthona (Great Britain).

Anthologies: Against Certainty: Poets for Peace Anthology (Chapiteau Press): “Against Certainty,” “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead” America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press): “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead,” “It Was Like This: You Were Happy,” “The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow,” “To Judgment: An Assay” The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner): “Poe: An Assay” The Best American Poetry 2005 (Scribner): “Burlap Sack” Manthology (University of Iowa Press): “A Man Walks Through His Life,” “The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow,” “Ryoanji: An Assay” Poets Against the War (Nation Books): “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead” The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Books): “After Long Silence,” “Against Certainty,” “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead,” “Lighthouse,” “Theology,” “Why Bodhidharma Went to Motel 6.”

A number of the poems included in this book appear in a limited-edition fine press book, Pebbles & Assays (Waldron Island, WA: Brooding Heron Press, 2005).

My deep gratitude to the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts for the support of fellowships in poetry, and to Yaddo, the Key West Literary Seminar, and the Vermont Studio Center, under whose hospitality many of the poems in this collection were written.

About the Author

Jane Hirshfield’s books of poetry include After; Given Sugar, Given Salt; The Lives of the Heart; The October Palace; Of Gravity & Angels; and Alaya. She is also the author of a collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and editor and co-translator of three books collecting the work of women writers from the past. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, and winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, Hirshfield’s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, Orion, and The American Poetry Review. She is a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, and she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley; at the University of Cincinnati; and in Bennington College’s MFA Writing Seminars.

BOOKS BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

Poetry

After

Given Sugar, Given Salt

The Lives of the Heart

The October Palace

Of Gravity & Angels

Alaya

Essays

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Anthology

Women in Praise of the Sacred:

43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women

Translations

The Ink Dark Moon:

Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu,

Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

(with Mariko Aratani)

Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems

(with Robert Bly)

Copyright