#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 access by meditation, that is below the specifics of language and doctrine.  As with the T’ang poet Wang Wei, there is no clutter of philosophical terminology or sect in Hirshfield’s work, just a centered emotion as well as the minute particulars that enliven and make vivid her poems, that make them poems rather than statements or epigrams.  Even in the short pieces that, after Milosz, she calls “Pebbles,” nothing snaps shut, there’s no Q.E.D.:  “The ideas of poets turn into only themselves, / as the hands of the clock do, / or the face of a person. / It changes, but only more into the person.”  She has as well the poems she calls (I presume after Kenneth Rexroth) Assays, that draw out more than they define, and she is wildly adept in the way single words can drop off into open spaces of emotion:

                  The red scarf

                  still hangs over the chairback.

                  In its folds,

                  like a perfume

                  that cannot be quite remembered,

                  inconceivable before.

       Hirshfield writes of connection, of the biosphere, of the commonality of human and nature; her first voice is contemplative and lyric, though she is not above raising the alarm.  The poem “Global Warming”:

                  When his ship first came to Australia,

                  Cook wrote, the natives

                  continued fishing, without looking up.

                  Unable to fear, it seemed, what was too large to be comprehended.

She speaks plainly rather than embroiders; the poems are genuinely complex rather than complicated, never given to flat statement but never labyrinthine or puzzling.  I would dare say her voice is feminine, as Jack Gilbert’s and Jim Harrison’s voices are masculine; I would say it in this blessed time when we realize how much of each quality is contained in the other.  And behind the quiet tone, there is always that compassion that the Buddha extolled: something deeper, fiercer even, than mere sympathy.  “I reject contentment: / into it, inexperienced saints have been seen to vanish, / in a burst of somewhat cloudy light.”  Rexroth wrote once of poets “going for the home run of collected editions.”  In the last few years the collected poems of Jack Gilbert and Wislawa Szymborska have instated their work for me as something I will return to as one returns to the classics, Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and whom have you (or Ono no Komachi or Izumi Shikibu, both of whom Hirshfield has translated, beautifully) and I suspect The Asking may do the same for me with Hirshfield.  Here is an assiduously practiced craft, and ever more finely inflected voice, and a writer who is the best kind of company for the going on—one who’s always a step or two further ahead on the road:

                  My two legs,

                  shaped to go forward,

                  obedient to can’t-know and must-be,

                  walk into the time that is coming.

The Asking: New and Selected Poems, by Jane Hirshfield.  Knopf, 2023.