NBCC poetry finalist Jane Hirshfield’s pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:
I’ve been finding Julia Hartwig’s “In Praise of the Unfinished,” translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter (Knopf), a metabolism-altering volume. Austerely intelligent questioning, the acute and subtle notation of both outer landscape and the psyche’s interior inventions, and a bracingly clear-eyed compassion mark these poems by a writer long preeminent in Poland but until now virtually unknown in the US. This book joins the section of the bookcase where Milosz, Szymborska, Herbert, Swir, Rozewicz, and Zagajewski (author of another extraordinary new book this season, “Eternal Enemies”) already live—for me, one of the great, illuminating constellations of world literature.—Jane Hirshfield