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Kurosawa's Dog

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In Hinrichsen's fifth collection of poems, he relates the soul drifting among different layers of being; "As if at any moment two good fabrics [different kinds of cloths hanging on a clothesline in the breeze]/might lie one above the other/in a shimmering array/or sunlight and color and consciousness...." [from Amish Linen] Though in The Sound-of-One-Hand-Clapping Shouting, the poet can mention Buddha, Jesus, God, Christ, and Mohammed (and Whitman), the concept and the effects are essentially Buddhist. The soul--the poet--is not torn between the different, various layers of being; there is no agony or confusion. Nor is there any sense of loss or incompleteness. Nor are the impressions or imagery dreamlike, as in surrealism. As in Buddhism, the state is one of awareness heightened so as to sense and notice the various layers one is amid blended with a passivity infused by the joy of being open (like Buddha or Whitman) to the bounty of other presences.

In On Purgatorio I, Hinrichsen notices, "tiny windows in the fields. And sometimes it [mercy] simply hovered in the seven times twenty panes of glass." His observance of dabs of sunlight in a field is the source of his meditation on "utter selflessness--one thing passing into another across the distance..." which leads to "the frank, religious sense of cleansing, nursing." The broken lines and irregular spacing of phrases in many of the poems connote the heightened, widened awareness inspiring the poems.