Search  for anything...
Knopf

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

  • Based on 0 reviews
Condition: New
Checking for the best price...
$17.59 Why this price?
Save $2.41 was $20.00

Buy Now, Pay Later

As low as $4 / mo
  • – 4-month term
  • – No impact on credit to apply
  • – Instant approval decision
  • – Secure and straightforward checkout

Ready to go? Add this product to your cart and select a plan during checkout.

Payment plans are offered through our trusted finance partners Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, Apple Pay, and PayTomorrow. No-credit-needed leasing options through Acima may also be available at checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Free shipping on this product

FREE 30-day refund/replacement

To qualify for a full refund, items must be returned in their original, unused condition. If an item is returned in a used, damaged, or materially different state, you may be granted a partial refund.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

Availability: 14 left in stock
Fulfilled by Amazon
Arrives Wednesday, Apr 22
Order within 10 hours and 46 minutes
Available payment plans shown during checkout
Protection Plan Protect Your Purchase
Checking for protection plans...

Description

A dazzling collection of essays on how the best poems work, from the master poet and popular essayist "Poetry," Jane Hirshfield has said, "is language that foments revolutions of being." In ten eloquent and highly original explorations, she unfolds some of the ways this is done--by the inclusion of hiddenness, paradox, and surprise; by a perennial awareness of the place of uncertainty in our lives; by language's own acts of discovery; by the powers of image, statement, music, and feeling to enlarge in every direction. Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bashō, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry's world-making takes place: word by charged word. By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible. Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf


Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 21, 2017


Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 40


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.83 x 7.4 inches


Frequently asked questions

If you place your order now, the estimated arrival date for this product is: Wednesday, Apr 22

Yes, absolutely! You may return this product for a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

  • Klarna Financing
  • Affirm Pay in 4
  • Affirm Financing
  • Afterpay Financing
  • PayTomorrow Financing
  • Financing through Apple Pay
Leasing options through Acima may also be available during checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Top Amazon Reviews

    • An Arresting College Course in One Volume
Format: Hardcover
With TEN WINDOWS Jane Hirshfield, one of this planet’s premier poets, has left her indelible mark on literature-- even if she never produces another book of prize-winning poems. Let me support that claim with a little back-story. I was an English literature major at Harvard, was married to a best-selling novelist for forty-five volatile years, have published three editions of a legal treatise, and three volumes of prose-poetry. That’s why I’m in awe of Jane’s ability to pack such powerful, original, and creative analysis into such lucid prose. No high-school English teacher should start another term without digesting TEN WINDOWS. On the other hand, I doubt most college English professors would dare mention the book, lest students force them to re-cast their own lectures to accommodate Hirshfield’s exhilarating compendium of insights. The depth of Hirshfield’s penetrating gaze isn’t confined to poetry, however. Sparkling beneath the surface of her unique literary analyses rest gems of profound wisdom about life itself. Indeed, I was so often dazzled that I could only absorb a few pages per day from her treasure trove. Let me cluster some samples appearing between pages 250 and 251: “The abiding necessity of surprise [in poetry] is one reason that factual recitation alone, though highly effective as an element, rarely leads to the transformation we seek and feel in good poems. The difference between ‘fact’ and ‘truth,’ the physicist Niels Bohr once said, is that a fact must be either true or false, while two opposing truths can be equally right, resonant, and informing. For determining facts, we turn to science (or, less happily, at times to courtrooms), but the business of writers is not answers; it is finding right questions…. Good poems make clear without making simple…. Pleasure, not purpose, mates one creature or image with another, and art’s seemingly useless pleasures are not idle. They are imagination serving the future in ways beyond will’s reach.” Glittering revelations like those will soon draw me back again to page one, so I can re-read, re-inforce, and re-enjoy her entire volume. Although her ideas have been neatly corralled behind ten “windows,” this beguiling arrangement scarcely contains her legions of strikingly new ways to comprehend poetry— and life. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2016 by Arthur W. Campbell
    • Stunning book
Format: Kindle
As someone who loves language but never really made it inside poetry, this book was a wonderful door opener (or more accurately, window opener). Its a tour through poems she loves and their inner workings, itself expressed so poetically. It’s quite lovely and I kept coming back to it. I picked it up during intense periods of work. I would read for five or ten minutes and feel refreshed and revitalized. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2024 by Kevin Williams
    • Who knew there were so many windows?
Format: Kindle
This is a wonderful, complex, but conversational book about poetry and what it means to human culture. The selections are uniformly terrific, and many were unknown to me. I would have liked some representativeness, though. I liked her inclusion of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, but it was small and not reflective of his great power. Her choice from Pessoa seemed stronger. It would have been great to see something of Robert Penn Warren or James Dickey, given her focus on the American tradition for some of the book. Other Americans from the Fugitive poets or agrarianism tradition would have matched nicely with some of the frontier exuberance of Whitman. And i thought the Basho was a bit much. I would have substituted some Tsvetaeva or Akhmatova or, more contemporaneously, the fabulous Ha Jin. These are minor quibbles of taste or choice, though, and I'm hardly in a position to challenge what she chose. A great, accessible book by a fine poet and critic. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2017 by Steven E. Sanderson
    • Like A Jellyfish
Format: Hardcover
This is going to be a strange statement: I really enjoyed reading this book; but if I'd known what was in it, I wouldn't have read it. Hirshfield is tremendous poet and her prose is dazzling. I just couldn't help but be swept up in the language of each of these essays. The exception was the chapter on Haiku which went on far too long. So why the paradox? This is going to sound incredibly inelegant especially given how exquisite Hirshfield's writing is: there's not much actually being said here. I felt bad even writing that. I can't agree more with Hirshfield's central belief: that poetry (and art in general) expands who we are and expands the possibilities of the world. It does this through surprise, ambiguity, and withholding. I couldn't agree more. But these are commonly held beliefs among poets and they've also been said recently and with much clearer supporting evidence by other writers like Richard Hugo, Tony Hoagland, Robert Bly, and Stephen Dobyns. Which brings me back to my opening statement. BECAUSE Hirshfield's thesis is TRUE (at least to this reader) and because her writing is so wonderful, she's able to expand and contract these same ideas over and over again without saying anything new. The book is a like a jellyfish puffing and closing its way through a fish tank: it's pretty and you have to stare a while in awe. But it's not really going anywhere. This, of course, is part of Hirshfield's cosmic vision--the book goes INWARD and that certainly IS somewhere. Kind of. But for me, having read so many books about the same thing, though I enjoyed her writing and revisiting the beautiful landscapes, I have no desire to go back ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2015 by MinnesotaMind
    • Hirshfield is a wonderful guide through poems
Format: Kindle
Jane Hirshfield doesn't just write some of the finest poetry being published at this moment, she is also a great explicator and celebrator of poems. In Ten Windows, she argues that since language has power and poetry is uniquely powerful language, poems can indeed change the world. I gave up on trying to write the world whole decades ago, but she still makes good points as she gives excellent readings of powerful poetry: "And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share." ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2015 by David Anthony Sam
    • Beautiful read
Format: Paperback
Elegant and far reaching. A beautiful read.
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024 by Sean Waters

Can't find a product?

Find it on Amazon first, then paste the link below.
Checking for best price...