D. A. Prince reviews The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Bloodaxe, 2024)
Starting with Alaya in 1982, Jane Hirshfield has published ten collections. That’s a lot to select from and as a result this is a substantial volume – 368 pages, mainly poetry. Contents pages, index, no notes, no introductions. The new poems, twenty-nine of them (although the Bloodaxe blurb claims thirty-one) open the volume. After that, they appear chronologically, which means we leave poems from 2020-2023 and dive straight into those written in 1971-1982. With many poets this confrontation with work written fifty years earlier would be a shock but Hirshfield has always worked within the same register, a quietness rooted in her Buddhist beliefs and her commitment to connection with the natural world. As a result there was nothing disjointed: I felt I was with the same calm voice, in much the same place. After that, watching her poems grow became unexpectedly absorbing – unexpected because what I’d initially dismissed as a same-ness in tone and subject became lessons in how to listen and read, both her and her surroundings.
Here, in the ‘new’ work, she is looking back, or – as this title explains – ‘Counting, New Year’s morning, what powers yet remain to me’:
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
It’s her New Year poem (she writes one every year, after the ritual New Year’s Eve house cleaning) allowing herself space for assessment, for reflection. Her list is domestic, comforting in the face of the troubled biosphere: she finds balance, and it’s reassuring. There are no miracles:
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend—
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking
This book is the summit of all her questions and looking, all her continuing asking. There’s no full stop because the questioning isn’t over as long as she’s alive. Her world is “generous” and also modest. From ‘Tin’:
To be a train station of existence is no small matter.
It doesn’t need to be Grand Central or Haydarpaşa Station.
The engine shed could be low, windowed with coal dust
under a slat-shingled roof. It could be tin.
‘To be a person’ explores her central concern, from the opening assertion (“To be a person is an untenable proposition”) through an assortment of homely behaviours to the delicately tentative conclusion: “To be a person may be possible then, after all.” It ends with a metaphor for what we might be: “[…] a pair of waiting workboots”. Hirshfield doesn’t provide accompanying notes and so her YouTube launch reading was helpful here: a painting of these boots provides the cover image, A Pair of Boots (Vincent Van Gogh, 1887). Listening to her talking online about her poems, I realised how little she draws specifically on named works of art or literature; it’s as though they are internalised, under the surface, another layer of knowledge about the world’s workings.
What I’d initially dismissed as a same-ness in tone and subject became lessons in how to listen and read, both her and her surroundings
As she says of herself “It was not given to me to write in the primary colours” (‘Invitation’), something I recognised, reading through her work and becoming familiar with the views from her windows, the plants in her North California garden. She never shouts and that’s a relief from all the – what can I call them? – louder-voiced contemporary poets. Her poetic voice in 2023 is almost identical to the voice from her 1988 collection, Of Gravity & Angels, when she can write:
The world is a blurred version of itself—
marred, lovely, and flawed.
It is enough.
Yet her world is full of detail in all sorts of ways. She rarely gives the date of a poem, so when she does it’s significant, as in ‘Today, when I could do nothing’, a narrative, ostensibly about rescuing an ant that has, somehow, come into the house with the morning paper, and returning it to the outside world:
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
She restores it to the outside world and the poem is over. Yet there’s a date, March 17, 2020. I’d have puzzled over this, then moved on, if Hirshfield hadn’t said in her online launch that this was the date of the start of lockdown in the USA. Then the small details drop into place: “A morning paper is still an essential service” (Yes, of course!). “This first day when I could do nothing, / contribute nothing / beyond staying away from my own kind, / I did this.” The sense of futility and lockdown isolation returns, via a poem about an ant. The date of ‘The Dead do not want us dead’ is September 15, 2001. That one’s easier because who could forget 9/11, although the event doesn’t appear in the text. It’s from her collection After, published in 2006.
I wonder how much understanding we lose by reading collections when they’re bundled into a Selected. The date of publication is still there, neatly on the Contents page and the poems don’t change. As readers, however, we’re further from the events, the political and geopolitical contexts, the emotional urgency that first shaped them. I can’t see an answer to this, only that it’s made me aware of a need to read round the edges, to listen for connections. As I said, Hirshfield is teaching me how to read her.
She is not a confessional poet, in the sense of mining her emotional relationships for material, so the few personal-descriptive poems stand out, like ‘1973’ (from The October Palace, 1994), recounting a first shared house, working the land, and – memorably – their cars:
We’d named them: Big Mama Tomato, Snooze.
Each was our first, as we
were each other’s first, in the farmhouse
for rent for the first time
in forty years surrounded by soybeans.
[…]
We nailed planks from the old barns onto the walls
by our bed, scraped a dozen layers of peeling paper
from the next room—the older they got,
the more lovely. That one we made cheerful yellow,
where I wrote the wildly sad poems of the very young.
It’s a rare glimpse. I’m struck by how long it took this memory to appear in print but, as her later work frequently shows, she is sensitive to time and its layers, and to what the future will make of the past, an idea that flickers across her writing.
Although Hirshfield’s involvement with science is part of her public life (she organised Poets for Science in 2017) she doesn’t push science at the reader. Her more overtly scientific poems are not about science per se but the human relationship with nature, as in ‘For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen’ (from Come, Thief, 2011) (not an easily-remembered title) where lichens that change nitrogen from unusable to usable are likened to:
[…] those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving,
unseen, unread, unremembered.
[…]
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.
Reading through – and, as a dutiful reviewer I read every page at least once, in numerical order – I wondered how other readers might approach a Selected of this length. Few, I suspect, would read it as I did. Those who already know her work might be glad to have so many poems between one set of covers; others, encountering her for the first time, might dip and read in patches. But patchy reading might miss how Hirshfield develops her own forms from book to book, and one example is the ‘pebbles’.
Each ‘one’pebble’ is a small, serious thought, closely-focussed and never over-written
Again, I’m glad Hirshfield explained these in her online launch, describing them as being something like haiku, but not quite. ‘Ten Pebbles’ first appears in After (2006), and ‘pebble’ sets (of different sizes) have appeared in every subsequent collection. These are short pieces, grouped under the ‘pebble’ heading only because of their diminutive size, not because they share a distinctive theme. They look like a handful of notebook jottings, seedlings that never grow to full size – but that’s not to dismiss them. Here’s one, in its entirety, from her new poems. It has the title ‘Here & Now’:
try to describe it
even one quick line
drawn with unlifted pencil
already wrong
Each ‘pebble’ is a small, serious thought, closely-focussed and never over-written. Once I’d spotted them I could read them across the collections, and compare how they both evolved from and played with ideas introduced in longer poems. It’s impossible to sum up a collection like The Asking in a few pithy sentences so I’d like these tiny poems to do it for me. They’re unassuming, shy and delicate; they’re about how humans bring their thoughts into being. Here, again in entirety, is ‘Global Warming’ (from ‘Ten Pebbles, After, 2006):
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.
Hirshfield is bearing witness, looking outwards beyond herself. Even if you only have time to dip, to pick out a few poems, this collection will repay your efforts. You might even feel that one of the more important tasks on your to-do list is to read the whole volume.
D. A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her most recent collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
