"Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins," ends the first poem in After, Jane Hirshfield’s extended investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. These alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from spareness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally over-looked 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.
After is also a book of elegies, both overt and implicit, both personal and culturally shared. Throughout sounds a bass-note awareness of time: its inexorable effects on our lives and the plunge into the moment’s richness that brings our singular, paradoxical recourse against its erasure. This is a profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry, including the newly released Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a "Best Book of 2006" by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times; Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She is also the author of The Heart of Haiku, an Amazon Kindle Single exploring the essence of haiku and its 17th-century founding poet, Matsuo Basho, which was named a "Best Kindle Single of 2011."
Hirshfield has also edited and/or co-translated three books collecting the work of poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems.
Hirshfield's other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University's Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California's California Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, McSweeney's, Orion, five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and many other publications, and has been featured numerous times on Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac program, as well as in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Hirshfield's work has been called "passionate and radiant" by the New York Times Book Review, and After was described in the San Francisco Chronicle's Book Review as evidencing "the grasp of a master" and "filled with somber, judiciously lit treasures." A starred review in Booklist describes "poems of exquisite restraint and meticulous reasoning," while a British magazine, Agenda, states, "The poems' realized ambition is wisdom." The Washington Post describes Hirshfield as taking her place in the "pantheon of modern masters of simplicity." Never a full-time academic, Hirshfield has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, a member of the Bennington College MFA faculty, and has appeared at writers conferences, literary centers, and festivals both in this country and abroad. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists in San Francisco, Detroit, Canberra, and Krakow.
Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953 and was a member of the first graduating class at Princeton University to include women. After graduating, she did a year of farm labor in New Jersey before moving west in a Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains. She studied Soto Zen intensively for eight years, including three in monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the wilderness inland from Big Sur, and received lay ordination in 1979. She has cooked at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, driven 18-wheel truck, worked as the independent editor of several books that have sold in the millions, and spent four years living without electricity. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in a small white house surrounded by fruit trees, a vegetable garden, lavender, and roses, with scientist Carl Pabo.
In Jane Hirshfield's sixth book of poetry entitled, "After," she is interested or invested in the use of words and their function in life and what they have to teach. The theme of this contemporary woman poet seems to dwell in her poem called "To Speech," "What lives in words is what words were needed to learn." After the poet has mastered the use of language, only then can it be manipulated into the truth. She is conscious of words associated with self awareness, namely: judgment, grief, theology, hope, articulation, possibility, speech, and she even grasps the concept of some of the most insignificant and magnificent words such as `to', `and', or `of.' It is important to mention the white space in between the words; Many of her words are short, concise, delicious, and function to be uttered and reclaimed. Among them include Hirshfield's first poem in her book, "After Long Silence" which seems to be a declaration of the very thing which she feels most important to convey to the reader of her poems: "The untranslatable thought must be the most precise/ Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins."
Hirshfield's poetry is like a walk through the awakening of ignorance, you are not sure what to expect, but once you have completed your journey you are never the same. Along the way Hirshfield uses sounds, symbols, elegies, personifiers, metaphors, and assays to convey her thoughts. Maya Angelou, a great poet in her own right once said, "I've gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware." Angelou and Hirshfield both require that the importance of being aware of words is one's own responsibility. Within the second to the last poem titled, "Letter to C," Hirshfield reminds the reader where the journey has taken them within her book of poems. In this poem there are references to the many symbols, sounds, and constructions uttered by the poet in her other poems; for example: Orpheus a tragic character which appears in her poem called "Flowering Vetch," the use of dogs which is a natural occurrence in more than half of her poems, Vilnius which is the title and subject of her poem "Vilnius," and Krakow which appears in her poem "Not Only Parallel Lines Extend to the Infinite." The poem "Letter to C," then functions to bring the reader from the beginning to the end of her book of poems.
Through Hirshfield's careful metaphor, the self "...carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room." Hirshfield's title, "After," becomes for the reader a kind of afterthought. After Hirshfield takes the reader through the many isolated incidences of which live is based one thing remains, "Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened." I would take her utterance a step further and say that "you awakened," to find yourself. Anyone who has the chance to read her poetry should not fail at the opportunity. Hirshfield style of writing poetry is accessible to anyone who wants to enter her world and unpack her words.
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These poems are astounding. Jane Hirshfield is succinct, I could hear the words slicing off her pen and onto the paper. She doesn't waste breath. If her poetry were to be labelled in Taoist terms it would be the Philosophical School of Tao, using her energy in the most efficient ways she can think or dream up. I read these with my head tilted and my mouth agape, she dissects language so thoroughly and with such compassion that the words and letters practically take on human qualities. I didn't put this book down until I was finished. You won't either.
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I have anticipated the release of Jane's latest work as she had read some of the poems at her workshops at the Tassajara Zen Center. I am not disappointed.
The last line in the opening poem summarizes and also hints at the poetry to follow. "Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins."
And Jane, in a recent reading, admitted that these poems do leave lines unended, thoughts unfinished.
And for this reader, that is a good reason to return to certain poems; to begin again, to see anew.
Michael
Santa Cruz, CA
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