Jane Hirshfield (2003)

Jane Hirshfield's twenty years of Zen practice inform her work and her life. "In the end Zen is simply about looking at human being and human nature, about how we are in the world and how the world is. And as a poet that is also what I want to explore," she told Atlantic Monthly. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for the newest of her five collections of poems, Given Sugar, Given Salt. The Los Angeles Times placed the book among the best of poetry in 2002, noting, "Few other poets honor what Hirshfield honors with such natural affection and precision - the ordinary objects of life and the deep current of poetry that flows through them."

A Bay Area resident, she's also active on-line as a long-term member of the computer bulletin board The Well. Like Bly and Barks, she is know for her translations that have resulted in two classics, The Ink Dark Moon and Women In Praise of The Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Her collection of essays about the art of poetry is titled Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry.

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