BOOK BARN

#293: GOING FOR THE HOME RUN. In writing elsewhere about Jane Hirshfield, I have mentioned her training and practice in Soto Zen Buddhism, something she tends to downplay in interviews. Any known kind of religious or philosophical affiliation can be an easy method for sticking a writer in a box—a label for use in place of critical thought. But I recur to this as I have always sensed in her work a center of quiet, of compassion—that humane and enlightened space one is to

#292: SENDAK IN BLACK AND WHITE—II. In the early nineteen-sixties, an editor at Macmillan introduced the poet Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak to each other; Jarrell had written a children’s story, The Bat-Poet, and the editor wanted Sendak to illustrate it. “That often remains simply professional, or it turns into a friendship,” Sendak said later. “In the case of Jarrell, it really did turn into a friendship.” They were both opera buffs; they visited; they talked boo

#291: ON THE CAMINO AGAIN. It is of course entirely possible that the revered objects which make some places the site of religious pilgrimage—from the mantle of the Virgin in Chartres Cathedral to the Buddha’s tooth in that temple in Sri Lanka—are simply bogus or mistaken, and not at all the sacred things they are said to be. Among the ritual actions suggested for visitors to the cathedral of Santiago in the northwest of Spain is a visit to the crypt holding the supposed b