Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

"With the exactitude of a surgeon and the sensuous attention of a chef, Hirshfield addresses, essay by essay, the art, craft, and act of making poetry . . . These essays are both brilliantly ambitious—one random passage in her last piece, on 'writing and the threshold life,' flows 14th-century Japanese poet Ono no Komachi (whose poems she has translated in the past) into Czeslaw Milosz into Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—and confidently clear." — Village Voice

Nine essays on the connection...