Ledger

A book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named "among the modern masters" (Washington Post).
From one of our most celebrated contemporary poets—long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England's T.S. Eliot Prize—comes Jane Hirshfield's Ledger, her most important work yet. From its already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw."), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our-present-day predicaments, and call us to action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacy of interconnection ("lichens, burdocks, mycelial mats between trees— / forgive...