Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
book tree house
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
ideas feet decision
Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
time
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
ends
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
mouths
The same words come from each mouth differently.
matter unexpected language
Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
cat doors long
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
cat missing mercy
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
being-yourself fate punishment
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
artist years umbria
Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.
oil soul solitude
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
dark joy balance
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
bottles perfume release
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,
death fine mesh
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.