After: Poems by Jane Hirshfield  (5)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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- Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology by Lauret E. Savoy on page 41, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Another Place: An Ecocritical Study of Selected Western American Poets by Andrew Elkins in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry by Andrew Schelling on page 101, and Back Matter
- The Body Eclectic: An Anthology of Poems by Patrice Vecchione on page 158, and Back Matter
- Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free by Mary D. Esselman in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
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