After: Poems - Hardcover

Hirshfield, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060779160 ISBN 13: 9780060779160

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2006

Synopsis

“Jane Hirshfield is one of our finest, most memorable contemporary poets.” —David Baker, The American Poet

"Hirshfield's poems . . . send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness.” — Booklist (starred review)

A profound, generous, and masterful sixth collection by one of the preeminent American poets of her generation, After explores incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with others and with all existence. Jane Hirshfield’s alert, incisive, and compassionate poems examine the human condition through subjects ranging from sparseness, possibility, judgment, and hidden grief to global warming, insomnia, the meanings to be found in generally overlooked 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.

About this title

About the Author

The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

From the Back Cover

"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.

Reviews

"Enough is not enough when it comes to poetry." So said one of the most accomplished practicioners writing in English today, Seamus Heaney. For him, the power of the poem is achieved by running more voltage through the poetic device, by "over-languaging the language." What distinguishes this very specialized work from all the rest of written expression is that palpable sense of more. Or sometimes less. . . .

Despite a number of interesting experimental movements, the dominant mode in American poetry over the past quarter-century is a kind of secular plainsong that steers clear of rich musicality, complicated structures and that notion of superfluity. Perhaps the contemporary sensibility has been affected by how frequently we've seen bad ideas trotted out in elaborate intellectual clothing. From poetry to politics to pop culture, we've learned to be wary of the thorn tucked away inside the dramatic flourish, the manipulative impulse concealed by stylistic embellishment. In reaction, the governing poetic principles seem to be clarity and simplicity.

In the hands of a skilled writer, especially one who has committed years to observing and thinking about some small corner of existence -- poets such as Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver and Louise Glück -- this poetry can achieve breathtaking effects that are all the more mystifying because, at first, we can find no apparent cause for this sudden in-rush of energy.

Very quietly, Jane Hirshfield has been producing work that is earning her a place in the pantheon of those modern masters of simplicity. The publication of her sixth volume of poetry, After, will only serve to broaden her audience and solidify that reputation.

Hirshfield is a practicing Buddhist who has made her home in northern California -- as did the venerable Gary Snyder before her. But her religious discipline is rarely an overt presence in her texts. Her poems are more in the spirit of the T'ang Dynasty masters such as Wang Wei, whose spiritual outlook was wholly ingrained in the simplest practices of daily life, a reflected light emanating from the landscape. By paring down the moment to its essential elements and allowing ephemeral thoughts to be anchored within the tangible things of the world, Hirshfield comes up with poems that brilliantly portray even mundane experiences as if they were nothing short of revelation.

Take the following short poem, which appears near the end of the new collection:

Red Scarf

The red scarf
still hangs over the chairback.
In its folds,
like a perfume
that cannot be quite remembered,
inconceivable before.

That the scarf "still" hangs over the chair makes us privy to a passage of time, a certain intimacy, the utter daily-ness of even the dearest relationships. Who laid it there, after a long day, intending to tidy up later when time allowed? And who voices the poem's two simple observations, all while leaving the depths of emotion unrevealed? Why can't she bring herself to put away the errant scarf, to restore the household to its proper order? That "inconceivable before" gradually solidifies in our consciousness until it becomes an irrevocable border; beyond it remain those old days of normality that, as is often the case, only convey how loved they were through their absence.

The elegiac spirit of the poem is quietly reinforced in even the smallest elements; and though the aural quality of the poem is subdued, listen to the interplay between the soft burr of the abundant r's set against the hard-edged limitation of the c's. Even before the mind comprehends, the ear responds to that muted tug-of-war between longing and the acceptance of loss.

The poet's approach is clearly at work in "After Long Silence," the collection's opening poem, bringing to bear, in equal measures, precise vision and rigorous thought; the result is a marvelous sense of spaciousness. As she stands alone in her kitchen at night, Hirshfield's words create a clearing where even the ordinary moment is capable of yielding a sense of life's momentousness (which the Buddhist terms "mindfulness" but the poet is too self-possessed to lecture us about). The poem concludes with two lines that set the benchmark for the work to come:

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Even when tackling subjects of obvious emotional intensity -- the deathbed of a friend ("The Bell Zygmunt"), the challenges of a spiritual life ("Theology" and "Between the Material World and the World of Feeling") -- Hirshfield strives for that same equanimity and unswerving attention, envying "the blue-green curve of a vase's shoulder, which holds whatever is placed within it -- the living flower or the dead -- with an equally tender balance."

Of course, Hirshfield's thoroughly human poems can only steer toward that perfection: "I, who am made of you only," she says to and about her concept of the moment, "speak these words against your unmasterable instruction -- // A knife cannot cut itself open,/ yet you ask me both to be you and to know you" ("Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant"). This metaphysical balancing act is where the poet has situated her writing. When the poems are less than enthralling, we find the balance has shifted dangerously toward the "knowing" rather than the "being" side of the scale, as in some of the "Assays" series -- deep investigations of the ordinary (like "Gravel," "Tears," and even those humble prepositions "Of," "To," and "And"). Yet even the least successful of them is still thoughtful, inventive, beautiful -- qualities many a lesser poet would bargain for in a heartbeat. And in the case of her best work, the poems are so open-hearted and marvelously conceived that they are not just beautiful themselves but effortlessly contain beauty -- much like her imagined blue-green vase. What's more, they make us suddenly aware of what we too contain at every savored moment of the day.

Reviewed by Steven Ratiner
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Serious, prayerful and governed by quietly sweeping abstract lines, Hirshfield's sixth collection of verse continues the meditative direction established in 2001's well-received Given Sugar, Given Salt. She subtitles many poems "an assay," meaning both a try and an exposition: the sky, the words "of " and "to" and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe all become such discursive test cases. Some assays are prose poems, a form that balances out Hirshfield's tropism toward restrained wonder. The tone overall, however, inclines decisively toward sadness and grief: the poet aspires "to live amid the great vanishing a cat must live,/ one shadow fully at ease inside another." Hirshfield brings a plainspoken American spirituality (think of Mary Oliver or Robert Bly) to bear on her interest in East Asian practice: a set of quite short (one to five lines) lyric efforts, under the collective title "Seventeen Pebbles," pares Hirshfield's sensibility to a Zen concision. A longer Japanese-influenced poem concludes, "slowness alone is not to be confused/ with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens." Clarification makes for consolation in this gentle and very unified book. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* A number of the finely measured and carefully weighted poems in Hirshfield's stirring new collection carry the subtitle "An Assay," meaning a trial or attempt, a study of characteristics, an analysis to determine the presence or absence of certain components. This is precisely what Hirshfield performs in poems constructed as cleverly and economically as riddles as she ponders the nature of hope, envy, certainty, and possibility. Intrigued with language's concealments and revelations, she has also crafted a series of provocative poems about how ordinary words--of, and, to, once--embody the workings of our minds. Keenly aware that there is much in the universe we're unable to detect and that we have little control over our fate, Hirshfield considers amplitude and chance in poems of exquisite restraint and meticulous reasoning, including a striking meditation on the paradoxical richness of spareness that can serve as her ars poetica. But these poems are not abstractions, they abound in earthly wonders: animals and leaves, rivers and snow, sky and rust. Hirshfield even calls her short poems "pebbles," and, indeed, they send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After

PoemsBy Jane Hirshfield

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright ©2006 Jane Hirshfield
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060779160

After Long Silence

Politeness fades,

a small anchovy gleam
leaving the upturned pot in the dish rack
after the moon has wandered out of the window.

One of the late freedoms, there in the dark.
The leftover soup put away as well.

Distinctions matter. Whether a goat's
quiet face should be called noble
or indifferent. The difference between a right rigor and pride.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Continues...

Excerpted from Afterby Jane Hirshfield Copyright ©2006 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060779160
• ISBN 13: 9780060779160
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 112