Given Sugar, Given Salt

Given Sugar, Given Salt

<p><em>An extraordinary new collection in which the widely acclaimed poet deepens and extends her explorations of essential human questions amid the changing and sensuous world.</em><p>"As water given sugar sweetens, give salt grows salty,/ we become our choices," writes Jane Hirshfield in <em>Given Sugar, Given Salt</em>, her fifth and most expansive volume of poems to date.  In this luminous and authoritative new collection, Hirshfield presents an ever-deepening and altering comprehensive of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."</p><p>In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, and death; of the losses and gains both passionate connection and solitude; of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage.  Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.  Through the breadth and honed beauty of her contemplations, and in the deep usefulness readers ascribe to her work in their own lives.  Hirshfield has found a place distinctively her own among American poets.</p>