Frequently short and spare, Jane Hirshfield’s poems highlight the smallest details, emphasising the power of each word. Time seems to move more slowly in her poems, taking advantage of the “moment before a shape/ hardens,” as she writes in ‘The Decision’. The contemplation and focus in her work allows the reader to look at the world with new eyes. With the proper awareness, a moment can be “Simply changed./ As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:/ it cannot be after turned back from.” One gets the impression that Hirshfield rarely turns back from anything, slowing the moment down in order to appreciate the minutiae that are so often overlooked. In the Georgia Review, Judith Kitchen wrote, “One senses that Jane Hirshfield has achieved a kind of precarious balance in which the optimism tips the scale. Everything is fleeting – the poems are suffused by this knowledge – but even though ‘today’s yes is different from yesterday’s yes,’ the answer is still in the affirmative.”
While her poetry frequently employs imagery from the natural world, Hirshfield does not shy away from the abstract. In a series of ‘Assays,’ she tackles concepts such as spareness and judgment, examining their components and distilling them down to concrete images, describing a personal relationship in the process. In ‘To Spareness: An Assay,’ she writes:
Remembering you, I remember also compassion.
I cannot explain this.
Nor how you live in a teabowl
or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.
Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,
meaning extra, but not by much –
Of the “clear-eyed and often luminous poems” in Jane Hirshfield’s most recent volume of poetry, Come, Thief (2011), Steven Ratiner of theWashington Post noted that Hirshfield, “has borrowed a page from the great Tang Dynasty masters (a poetry also deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy) and fused style and philosophical outlook into a fresh way of representing experience”. The influence of Buddhism is evident in many of Hirshfield’s poems, though, as Ratiner notes, Hirshfield’s work is not defined by religion. Rather, her practice of Buddhism can be felt in how she “slips easily from the subjective to the objective realms”. These lines from ‘Works & Loves,’ a poem in sections, make that evident:
The happy see only happiness,
the living see only life,
the young see only the young,
as lovers believe
they wake always beside one also in love.
Although Hirshfield's poems reverberate between the objective and subjective in a seemingly effortless manner, her speakers are not unaffected. The multiplicity of viewpoints are felt as a chorus of presence in ‘Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives In’: “in me are lives I do not know the names of,// nor the fates of,/ nor the hungers of or what they eat.” Similarly, ‘Works & Loves’ begins: “Rain fell as a glass/ breaks,/ something suddenly everywhere at the same time.” Hirshfield’s ability to tune the reader’s attention, or, in this case, to explode it, results in a fresher, broader reading of the everyday. Indeed, in a profile on Jane Hirshfield written by Cynthia Haven for PoetryFoundation.org, Hirshfield says, "The world is altered by good, new poems. It is made larger, given new windows that open out onto different landscapes and that also shine an altered light back into the known, as opening a new window in what used to be a wall changes not only the wall but the room.”
Jane Hirshfield’s work has been inspired by a series of influences in both the Eastern and Western traditions: “Greek and Roman lyrics, the English sonnet, those foundation stones of American poetry Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, ‘modern’ poets from T. S. Eliot to Anna Akhmatova to C. P. Cavafy to Pablo Neruda – all have added something to my knowledge of what is possible in poetry,” Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. Equally influential have been classical Chinese poets Du Fu and Li Po; classical Japanese Heian-Era poets Komachi and Shikibu; and Eskimo and Nahuatl poetic traditions. Although she is often described as a Zen poet, Hirshfield’s poetry has a universal appeal that goes beyond any spiritual tradition: “For me, studying Zen is simply studying what it is to be a human being who pays attention.”
Jane Hirshfield’s recent collections include Come, Thief (2011), After (2006), and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001). In addition to her own collections, Hirshfield has translated several works by early female poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). She has also written a collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997). Hirshfield’s eighth collection of poetry and her second essay collection are due out from Knopf in 2015. In 2012 she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Bibliography
Poetry
Alaya, Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, Princeton, 1982
Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1988
The October Palace, HarperCollins, New York, 1994
The Lives of the Heart, HarperCollins, New York, 1997
Given Sugar, Given Salt, HarperCollins, New York, 2001
After, HarperCollins, New York, 2006
Come, Thief, Knopf, New York, 2011
Other
(Editor and translator, with Mariko Aratani) The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Scribner, New York, 1988; expanded edition, Random House, New York, 1990
(Editor and translator) Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, HarperCollins, New York, 1994
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, HarperCollins, New York, 1997
(Translator, with Robert Bly) Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004
Links
PoetryFoundation.org: ‘Kitchen Ants and Everyday Epiphanies: For Jane Hirshfield, every action is a form of judgment.’ by Cynthia Haven
PoetryFoundation.org: ‘Remembering Stanley Kunitz’ by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘All the Difficult Hours and Minutes’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘A Cedary Fragrance’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘The Envoy’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘Heat’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘The Heat of Autumn’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘It Was Like This’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘Of: An Assay’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘The Pear’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘To Judgment: An Assay’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘Tree’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poem of the Day: ‘The Woodpecker Keeps Returning’ read by Jane Hirshfield
PoetryFoundation.org, Poetry Off the Shelf: ‘All Too Human’
PoetryFoundation.org, Poetry Off the Shelf: ‘Jane Hirshfield’
PoetryFoundation.org, Poetry Everywhere: ‘For What Binds Us' read by Jane Hirshfield
Washington Post: ‘In 'Come, Thief,' a stealth meditation of quotidian human experience’ by Steven Ratiner
Poets’ Quarterly: Interview with Jane Hirshfield
The Best American Poetry blog: A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 1
The Best American Poetry blog: A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 2
The Best American Poetry blog: A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 3
