"One of America's best-known & most respected poets offers a collection of nine essays that, taken together, constitute an intriguing primer on reading poetry. Just as a gate enables passage from outside to inside, so poetry forges a connection between our outer and inner lives. One who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. In this brilliant and lucid series of nine essays, award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield teaches us to open our own gates of perception to recognize and appreciate the poetry in our lives."@en
"A gate enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays. Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive, and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. In between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning enfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory, and the importance of the shadow to good art."

Nine gates : entering the mind of poetry : essays