Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain. The poems address subjects ranging from the importance of "sabbath" moments in which nothing seems to happen and the love between two aged horses to Lavoisier's discovery of modern chemistry and the 1989 "velvet revolutions" of Eastern Europe. Grounded in a series of meditations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world - a heart envisioned as an almost independent being, whose own needs and desires require of us integration, acceptance, and finally praise - The October Palace is contemplative and sensuous, intellectual and emotional, philosophical and musical, and, above all, serious in its encounter with precisely experienced and deeply questioned life.
