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    After: Poems
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    After: Poems
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    After: Poems
    Ebook104 pages57 minutes

    After: Poems

    By Jane Hirshfield

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets.” —David Baker, The American Poet

    "Hirshfield's poems . . . send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness.” — Booklist (starred review)

    A profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. Jane Hirshfield’s alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from sparseness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally overlooked parts of speech, and the metaphysics of sneezing. In respective series of “assays” (meditative imaginative accountings) and “pebbles” (each a “brief, easily pocketable perception that remains incomplete until the reader’s own response awakens inside it”), Hirshfield explores a poetry-making that looks simultaneously outward and inward, finding resonant and precise containers for the deepest currents of our inner life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 4, 2010
    ISBN9780062008596
    Unavailable
    After: Poems
    Author

    Jane Hirshfield

    The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

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    Reviews for After

    3.5/5

    112 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      When a Columbine like shooting occurs at a small high school, a neighboring school administration takes drastic measures to ensure nothing like this could happen to them.As the rights of the students for the "good of all" begin to dramatically disappear, it is obvious that brave new world has taken over and the school soon becomes prison like.When students learn of the heavy handiness and experience the fear generated by a particular administrator, they know it is out of control and there is no turning back.
    • 4/5
      The novel, After, encompasses the theme that one should only take extreme measures with probable cause. In the beginning, Tom, the protagonist like many of the other students in his classroom receives a phone call from his father. Everyone suddenly become aware of the shooting that took place in a small high school. Throughout the middle of the novel, the schools Greif councilor is introduced and in attempt to control the students he terrorizes and threatens them. By the end of the novel it has become apparent that Dr. Willner has mental issues; for when he expels students from the school he leaves the impression that those students are no longer living. The story ends with Tom, his girlfriend and his friend leaving the city with his family to get far away from the city they once called home. (330/330)
    • 4/5
      MY REVIEW: I loved every minute of this book. The subject matter is so scary based on the fact that something like this could actually happen, and how easily it would be to accomplish something like this. The only thing that I would say I didn't like was the ending of the book. It seems as though it was left open for the possibility of a sequal, but I don't think it was. Now, if a sequal ever does come out, I'll be the first one there to buy it. Basically, this book is worth your time to read.
    • 5/5
      A truly terrifying, edge-of-your-seat, if slightly over-the-top thriller. Those who find it farfetched may want to read the book Help at Any Cost, a nonfiction study of the "troubled teen" industry.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. As a teacher, I can see how some of this could happen. I would have liked a different ending or at least a hint of what it was all about; however, parts of it rang all too true.
    • 4/5
      A high school administration overreacts to a school shooting at a neighboring district, and implements a set of increasingly restrictive "security measures." Stark, chilling, dystopian. A good way to get teens thinking and talking about the civil liberties they take for granted, and what can happen when you sacrifice certain freedoms for a sense of security.
    • 4/5
      When a nearby school experiences a tragic, fatal school shooting, the students at another school cope with restrictive new rules that chink away at their freedoms until it's all gone.
    • 3/5
      Quite good "what if" type book but the ending didn't really resolve anything.
    • 4/5
      Francine Prose's novel After opens with the news that three students at Pleasant Valley High School just killed five kids and three teachers and critically wounded fourteen others. As word of the shooting spree spreads through nearby Central High School, the students are understandably shocked. Little do they know the worst is yet to come at their own school. In her first book written for young adult readers, Prose (Blue Angel, Household Saints) paints a terrifying picture of conservative politics run amok as overzealous adults try to strip away civil liberties. Out of grief comes a witch hunt designed to root out non-conformity and individual expression. Heady stuff for a novel geared to teens, but Prose pulls it off masterfully with a plot that tightens the tension as it goes along. The 330 pages can be read in one sitting, but the nightmarish paranoia continues to cling long after you've set the book aside. As the title suggests, it's what happens after the Pleasant Valley shootings that's at the heart of the book. First, a grief and crisis counselor named Dr. Willner arrives at Central. Then come the metal detectors, and the strict dress code (no Commie red is allowed), then the random drug tests and the subversive "Bus TV" where students watch ultra-patriotic "Great Moments in History" every day on the ride to and from school. The story is chillingly familiar. We read about these things in our newspapers all the time—for every catastrophic event, there's an equally catastrophic overreaction. For Tom Bishop, the novel's narrator, and his best friends Brian, Avery and Silas (part of a sub-clique known as the "Smart Jocks"), life gets increasingly more rigid and unforgiving with each ring of the school bell. A far cry from life at Central before the school killings: Everyone had a place; you were allowed to be who you were. I mean, whoever you were. It was totally live and let live. But after Pleasant Valley, all that began to change. It all starts with Willner, the creepy counselor. Dr. Willner was very tall, with a beard. He looked a little like Abraham Lincoln, but without the sweet-natured saintly part. He reminds Tom of the Lincoln robot at Disney World, which should remind astute horror fans that the Hall of Presidents is where one of those Stepford husbands used to work. In one way, Willner wants to turn the entire school population into robots. The Stepford Students. Willner speaks in a stream of psychobabble and, in nightly e-mails sent home to the parents, he encourages them to start lacing their conversations with "sharing," "reaching out," and "exploring our feelings." Those parents who succumb to Willner's suggestions soon begin acting like pod people straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a movie which becomes central to the novel's plot). The repression begins cloaked in good intentions (as most repression does) as the adults merely want to prevent another Pleasant Valley tragedy from happening in their town. At his first school assembly, Willner tells the student body: "We can no longer pretend to ourselves that it can't happen here. And so we must change our lifestyle to keep our community safe and make sure that it won't happen. It means sharing our feelings, becoming better people. Beginning the hard work of healing and recovery. Working through our fear and grief. And in the process maybe giving up some of the privileges that we may have taken for granted. I am afraid that circumstances make it a virtual certainty that some of the privileges that we all have enjoyed may have to be taken away." Remind you of something someone in the echelons of our government might have said in the past two years? Under the Willner Plan, students are expected to put the good of society before their own individual well-being. After echoes with the loud goose-steps of civil-liberty threats from McCarthyism to the Patriot Act. (I have to be careful what I write—I never know when They might be listening) After only loses some of its toxic bite in its final pages as Prose tries to pull out of the story's bleak nose-dive into a paranoid nightmare worthy of The Twilight Zone. The novel ends on a note of half-hearted optimism—as if the author stepped back to take a look at the dystopian landscape she'd painted and realized it might be too apocalyptic for young minds to handle. After all, things could never really get that bad, could they? Could they?