'With the exactitude of a surgeon and the sensuous attention of a chef, Hirshfield addresses, essay by essay, the art, craft, and act of making poetry . . . These essays are both brilliantly ambitious--one random passage in her last piece, on 'writing and the threshold life, ' flows 14th-century Japanese poet Ono no Komachi (whose poems she has translated in the past) into Czeslaw Milosz into Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman--and confidently clear.' -- Village Voice Nine essays on the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives, from esteemed poet and thinker Jame Hirshfield. 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