In this luminous and authoritative new collection, Jane Hirshfield presents an ever-deepening and altering comprehension of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."
In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, death, and of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.
Celebrated as an anthologist (Women in Praise of the Sacred, etc.), Hirshfeld seeks wisdom in the introspective occasions everyday life provides for this fifth collection. As in The October Palace, Hirshfeld's stripped-down diction and hushed sentences attend to her speaker's psychic losses and transformations: "For a year I watched/ as something--terror? happiness? grief?--/ entered and then left my body." "Dream Notebook" wrests a new-seeming subject from an old lyric quarry--not our dreams, but the way we forget them--while other poems consider household objects ("Pillow," "Ladder") in novel ways. Hirshfeld, who has also published a prose work on religion and poetry, uses Buddhism to inform a number of moving, straightforward lyrics and verse-essays (on "Clocks," "Ink," and "Sleep"). Elsewhere poems appeal to autobiography ("I, a woman of forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples") or take up, along with the speaker's overt self-consciousness, the powers and limits of poetry: "Does a poem enlarge the world,/ or only our idea of the world?"; "Why is it so difficult to speak simply?" A few such questions can go a long way, and Hirshfeld relies on their diffuse power too often: this long book of short poems might have been better shorter. A more serious flaw is Hirshfeld's dependence on Louise Glck's characteristic modes: the chilly, interior inquiries and flat declarations will seem very, very familiar to the latter's readers. Yet if Hirshfeld rarely surpasses her model, she uses it well: always accessible and on occasion profound, her new work will likely add to her large circle of admirers.
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From Library Journal
Poet, essayist, anthologist, and translator Hirschfield has infused her fifth book of poetry with the pensiveness of middle age. Amid the comfort of familiar things "the dog, the blue coffee mug" there is the disconsolate sense of life passing and the melancholy sloughing off of former selves: "One woman washes her face,/ another picks up the boar-bristled hairbrush,/ a third steps out of her slippers./ That each will die in the same bed means nothing to them." Hirschfield sees her life not as a static condition but as a fluid, changeable medium: "As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,/ we become our choices." Over and over, Hirschfield attempts to speak clearly and plainly while acknowledging the difficulty perhaps the impossibility of doing so. In her Zen-influenced attempts to reduce poetry to the essential statement, she is frustrated with her too-human failures. In one very likable poem called "Button," she envies a button for its invulnerability to that unattractive emotion: "A button envies no neighboring button,/ no snap, no knot, no polyester-braided toggle./ It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard." These are assured, controlled poems that tread carefully where others have trampled. They should be enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib. LLP, New York Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
I discovered Jane Hirshfield recently through a Pam Houston essay, "Redefining Success," in which the two discuss the meaning of success while walking along Muir Beach. The 69 poems in this new collection are short and simple on the surface, but deep with meaning. "Pyrocanthus berries redden in rain" (p. 6). "A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question./ Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs" (p. 9). "Each pebble in this world keeps/ its own counsel" (p. 14). A button "is its own story, completed" (p. 20). "Soup grows cold in the question" (p. 24). "A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle" (p. 55). Rocks "do not question silence,/ however long" (p. 64). Dogs sleep, "old ones especially" (p. 78). Hirshfield's poetry suggests that she is more fully present in the experience of living than the rest of us. Her observations are amazing.
As a poet, Hirshfield finds meaning in the mundane and habitual. "There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing" she writes in "The Envoy" (p. 3). In "Rebus," she writes: "As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,/ we become our choices" (p. 12). "As for the boulder,/ its meditations are slow but complete," she observes in "Rock" (p. 64).
Hirshfield's thin, brown book contains 69 reasons to read poetry. Whether she's walking on Muir beach with Pam Houston, or writing the poetry collected here, Hirshfield knows success.
G. Merritt
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I first discovered This book of poetry in a issue of O magazine or the Oprah magazine and curious as to what kind of poetry Oprah endorses, as this is the first book of poetry she has endorsed that I know of, I ordered a copy of it for myself from Amazon. It is a breathtaking collection of poems that are reminescent of one of my favorite poets Raineir Maria Rilke. I am copying one of her poems below to demonstrate what I mean: " Only when I am quiet and do not speak do the objects of my life draw near. Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug. Hesitant even the towles, for all thier intimate knowledge and scent of bleach. How steady thier regard as they ponder , dreaming and waking, the entrancment of my daily wanderings and tasks. Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose, they seem to be thinking, a quiet judgment that glistens between the glass doorknobs.
Yet thiers is not the false reserve of a scarcely concealed ill will, nor the other, active shying:of pelted rocks.
No, not that. For I hear the sigh of happiness each object gives off if I glimpse for even an instant the actual instant-
As if they believed it possible I might join thier circle of simple, passionate thusness, thier hidden rituals of luck and solitude, the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I." ( This is my favorite poem out of the book and to me it is so much like Rilke's poetry that speak of solitude and how things in our life need to be recognized need to be noticed in order for them to really be real to us. Rilke spoke of the tangible things in our lives and need for solitude etc just as Hirshfield does here so beautifully and movingly. These poems can really get you to comtemplate life and and are so touching and full of meaning and I recommend Given Sugar Given Salt to anyone who is also a Rilke fan and to anyone who would like to be moved by a poem andseeks deeper meaning in poetry. Though this volume of poetry is small in length it is big on thought and well worth the . . . money. . .. Poetry lovers get this book you will not be disappointed.
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This review is from: Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems (Paperback)
Beautiful, lyrical, lingering poems. The kind that never hit you the same way twice. The kind you remember suddenly at odd moments. Think Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda. Jane Hirshfield is a little less punchy, a little more concrete, a little less heartstopping, respectively. Earthy and nostalgic. A lovely voice in her own right. [Mrs. Readwell's Recommendation: Read to savor.]
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