What do you think?
Rate this book
The Beauty: Poems
The Beauty, an incandescent new collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices, opens with a series of dappled, ranging “My” poems—“My Skeleton,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” “My Weather”—using materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by; reflecting on advice given her long ago—to avoid the word “or”—she concludes, “Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life.” Hirshfield’s lines cut, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability, her tender consciousness of the unjudging beauty of what exists, her abiding contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings, sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For this poet, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.” Hirshfield’s riddling recipes for that world (“add salt to hunger”; “add time to trees”) offer a profoundly altered understanding of our lives’ losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.
129 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 3, 2015
102 people are currently reading
1235 people want to read
About the author
Jane Hirshfield
71 books619 followersJane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers’ PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:
Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 138 reviews
February 19, 2018
Reading Hirshfield is like eating the simplest fruit, ripened to perfection, from the tree where it grew, but there's a complexity of flavor there, like a bee snuck in one grain of pepper where only nectar should run, and you can't quite place that strangeness on your tongue, you can't quite understand some of it, then it's gone and all you taste is the utter beauty of this thing a poet can make.
September 28, 2015
I read these poems because the book was named as a finalist for the National Book Award.
Poetry is very subjective and just because I didn't love these poems doesn't mean you won't. I feel like this poet sits around by herself and muses on things, then writes those thoughts down and calls them poetry. Some of the time this is very successful, such as "My Skeleton," about the changing nature of her relationship with her physical body - her bones, her skin, her strength.
In other situations I found it to be far less successful, with thoughts that didn't seem brought to completion, often discarding pronouns and connections. Poems like "In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed." I have to admit. I read this one out loud so I could find some shared experience in the bizarre combination of ideas that became printed as a poem.
Perhaps this just isn't my style of poetry! I did read all of them twice and go find videos of her reading some just to make sure I still felt the same way.
Poetry is very subjective and just because I didn't love these poems doesn't mean you won't. I feel like this poet sits around by herself and muses on things, then writes those thoughts down and calls them poetry. Some of the time this is very successful, such as "My Skeleton," about the changing nature of her relationship with her physical body - her bones, her skin, her strength.
In other situations I found it to be far less successful, with thoughts that didn't seem brought to completion, often discarding pronouns and connections. Poems like "In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed." I have to admit. I read this one out loud so I could find some shared experience in the bizarre combination of ideas that became printed as a poem.
Perhaps this just isn't my style of poetry! I did read all of them twice and go find videos of her reading some just to make sure I still felt the same way.
February 8, 2024
I've been following Hirshfield closely for the last couple of decades. I deeply respect her devotion to the art, her unwillingness to let any kind of careerism interfere with her practice. This book was a gem. Here's a short review I wrote of it a few years ago:
In Jane Hirshfield’s poetry there is an unmistakable conjunction of precision and mystery. The precision is both in her observations and in her careful choice of language to record them–her poems feel as if every word, every line break, every comma, has been weighed and reweighed. Yet there is a mystery in them, too. Though it defies easy summary, it pushes us, and possibly even her, into new imaginative spaces. For instance, here in its entirety is one of my favorite Hirshfield poems, “My Species,” from her most recent collection, The Beauty:
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
There is the small domestic detail that feels exact and true. And then there is that extension into something larger that begins with “patience.” But what are we, the “species,” supposed to make of this? The heart is the heart of the artichoke, but it is clearly something else as well. My heart? Your heart? And if you read these thirty words aloud, they produce a kind of music. Some of it comes from the repetition in a small space, but that doesn’t explain it all.
We don’t need it explained. It is enough to let the poem do its work on us. Hirshfield is a practicing Buddhist, one of the talking heads on the award-winning PBS show The Buddha back in 2010. She has also written a couple of wonderfully clear books about writing poems, called Nine Gates and Ten Windows, that give glimpses of the work, the education, and the dedication that has gone into this life of poetry. One of the few contemporary poets who has not chosen a life in academia, Hirshfield has devoted herself to her art, and we can only imagine what that devotion has cost her.
Even the title of her most recent collection, The Beauty, makes a jump most intellectuals and artists are reluctant to make these days. The beauty implies that there is one, a definite, even approachable beauty that we would recognize once we saw it. I doubt that Hirshfield would make any claims of having found the one beauty, but her work is shaped by the search for it. This book ends with a poem that seems to be about numbers but then goes somewhere different:
I wanted my fate to be human.
Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
In Jane Hirshfield’s poetry there is an unmistakable conjunction of precision and mystery. The precision is both in her observations and in her careful choice of language to record them–her poems feel as if every word, every line break, every comma, has been weighed and reweighed. Yet there is a mystery in them, too. Though it defies easy summary, it pushes us, and possibly even her, into new imaginative spaces. For instance, here in its entirety is one of my favorite Hirshfield poems, “My Species,” from her most recent collection, The Beauty:
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
There is the small domestic detail that feels exact and true. And then there is that extension into something larger that begins with “patience.” But what are we, the “species,” supposed to make of this? The heart is the heart of the artichoke, but it is clearly something else as well. My heart? Your heart? And if you read these thirty words aloud, they produce a kind of music. Some of it comes from the repetition in a small space, but that doesn’t explain it all.
We don’t need it explained. It is enough to let the poem do its work on us. Hirshfield is a practicing Buddhist, one of the talking heads on the award-winning PBS show The Buddha back in 2010. She has also written a couple of wonderfully clear books about writing poems, called Nine Gates and Ten Windows, that give glimpses of the work, the education, and the dedication that has gone into this life of poetry. One of the few contemporary poets who has not chosen a life in academia, Hirshfield has devoted herself to her art, and we can only imagine what that devotion has cost her.
Even the title of her most recent collection, The Beauty, makes a jump most intellectuals and artists are reluctant to make these days. The beauty implies that there is one, a definite, even approachable beauty that we would recognize once we saw it. I doubt that Hirshfield would make any claims of having found the one beauty, but her work is shaped by the search for it. This book ends with a poem that seems to be about numbers but then goes somewhere different:
I wanted my fate to be human.
Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
April 17, 2019
QUARTZ CLOCK
The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
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.
The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
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.
October 16, 2024
Nobody plans to be a ghost.
(from “Things Keep Sorting Themselves”)
…many say we and hear I
say you or he and
hear I
what can we do with this problem
a bowl held in both hands
cannot be filled by its holder
x, says the blue whale
x, say the krill
solve for y, says the ocean, then multiply by existence
the feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth
ice is astonished by water
a person misreads
delirium as delphinium
and falls into
a blueness sleepy as beauty when sneezing
the pronoun dozes
(from “Mosquito”)
Other highlights: “The Problem,” “A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness,” “A Well Runs Out of Thirst,” “This Morning, I Wanted Four Legs,” “Hamper,” and “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.”
October 24, 2023
this definitely contains some of my favorite poems ever. beautiful beautiful beautiful. the whole time I’m thinking, how. how does she do it? just tell me how
May 17, 2015
Jane Hirshfield is now 60. It's a great gift to be have been reading and loving her work for over 23 years. Same themes, same sense of balance, weight and precision, but more of an awareness of aging and death. And love that lasts, in its various forms. This is a book I love the way I love an old friend: with gladness and a sense of comfort that we are living in the same world.
January 25, 2019
I first came to Hirshfield's poetry from her book on writing poetry which blew me away. This collection did not immediately grab me as some poetry can. However, when I continued to read through the volume, the language and often profound insights wrapped in the mundane made a mark on me. After reading her poems and walking outside, I have a little more presence to the world around me.
September 23, 2015
If you had told me I would have enjoyed this collection after the first few poems, I would have thrown a fit. By the end, I was taken in by Hirshfield's language. Not every poem hits its mark. And some of them are just a bit too flowery, crystal worshipping. But the strong poems are really strong.
July 7, 2024
A lovely collection, something to read slowly and savor. Hirshfield’s poems, especially the shorter ones, often seem to me like Zen koans. The short ones, especially, seem like little nuggets that can be used for meditation or to examine a paradox. One doesn’t read as a typical or logical “story,” but rather a vignette that turns on a moment of insight and awakens us, too, to something we hadn’t thought of before. I know she studied for years at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Her themes are derived from Zen, but with a light touch, I’d say.
This book deserves a longer review. I’ll try to add to it later. Here are a couple of those nuggets.
Still Life
Loyalty of a book
to its place on the shelf
in a still life.
Like that,
the old loves continue.
Quartz Clock
The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
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.
This book deserves a longer review. I’ll try to add to it later. Here are a couple of those nuggets.
Still Life
Loyalty of a book
to its place on the shelf
in a still life.
Like that,
the old loves continue.
Quartz Clock
The ideas of a physicist
can be turned into useful objects:
a rocket, a quartz clock,
a microwave oven for cooking.
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.
April 17, 2024
some very good poems ("Away from home, I thought of the Exiled Poets") and very good lines
("As on a child's map, / where X / marks both riddle and treasure. // It is near, but not here." (A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness))
("He climbs a tree / that is equallly ahistoric. // His heart works harder." (In Praise of Being Peripheral))
("As on a child's map, / where X / marks both riddle and treasure. // It is near, but not here." (A Photograph of a Face Half Lit, Half in Darkness))
("He climbs a tree / that is equallly ahistoric. // His heart works harder." (In Praise of Being Peripheral))
September 25, 2024
hirshfield IS brat
February 19, 2016
Loyalty of a book
to its place on the shelf
in a still life.
*
A person protests to fate:
“The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me.”
Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.
*
silence stitches itself
around hopes, thoughts, and words.
*
Like that,
the old loves continue.
I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.
to its place on the shelf
in a still life.
*
A person protests to fate:
“The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me.”
Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.
*
silence stitches itself
around hopes, thoughts, and words.
*
Like that,
the old loves continue.
I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.
December 10, 2016
A collection I will definitely purchase for my collection --poems that convolute and resolve, stretch the form, breathe a startling freshness into everyday things.
Notable poems:
p. 14 My Corkboard
p. 24 In a Room with Many Windows
p. 42 Mop without Stick
p. 47 Like the Small Hole by the Path Side Something Lives In
p. 63 I Wanted Only a Little
p. 71 As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail
Notable poems:
p. 14 My Corkboard
p. 24 In a Room with Many Windows
p. 42 Mop without Stick
p. 47 Like the Small Hole by the Path Side Something Lives In
p. 63 I Wanted Only a Little
p. 71 As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail
October 18, 2021
many of the poems in this book become more mystical the more you read them, slowly becoming incantations to something unknown but ultimately this collection never delivers that gut wrenching, cathartic truth-telling moment that makes you slam the book down in elation or disgust—both acceptable reactions to hard-hitting, truth-seeking poetry.
January 31, 2016
What elegant poems! Hirshfield has the gift to connect the unconnected into a wisdom, into a beauty, elegance....
Her poems are short meditations and crystallized mists. Reading them I can now read and understand the runes.
Highly recommended.
Her poems are short meditations and crystallized mists. Reading them I can now read and understand the runes.
Highly recommended.
November 10, 2015
You ate the stories of others /
because your own were already inside /
you and you were still hungry
because your own were already inside /
you and you were still hungry
December 28, 2022
"to live like a painting / looked into from more than one angle at once" (90).
I'm back in Tennessee for a bit, which means lovely new (old) books from McKay's! I scored so many poetry collections for $1.50/$2.00 each. I was literally gasping aloud in the aisle with glee.
"the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot, / or the way they keep trading places, / grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living" (70).
This is a collection that grew on me as it developed. Hirshfield's imagination and ability to use blank space and abstraction to reach a place of precision is incredible. For example, this is an entire poem: "I moved my chair into sun / I sat in the sun / the way hunger is moved when called fasting" (72). Or the ending of "My Life was the Size of My Life:" "I was hungry, then, and my life, / my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep / our hands off our clothes on / our tongues from" (30).
Thank you, literary Twitter, for sharing the wonder of Jane's writing and making "My Species" go viral several times. I would recommend her to poet friends who like Mary Oliver and Mary Ruefle. <3
"In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, / the mushroom scent lingers... / As a person who's once loved completely, / a country once conquered, / does not release that stunned knowledge... / Unburnable mushrooms are other. / They darken the air they come into. / Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken" (38).
I'm back in Tennessee for a bit, which means lovely new (old) books from McKay's! I scored so many poetry collections for $1.50/$2.00 each. I was literally gasping aloud in the aisle with glee.
"the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot, / or the way they keep trading places, / grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living" (70).
This is a collection that grew on me as it developed. Hirshfield's imagination and ability to use blank space and abstraction to reach a place of precision is incredible. For example, this is an entire poem: "I moved my chair into sun / I sat in the sun / the way hunger is moved when called fasting" (72). Or the ending of "My Life was the Size of My Life:" "I was hungry, then, and my life, / my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep / our hands off our clothes on / our tongues from" (30).
Thank you, literary Twitter, for sharing the wonder of Jane's writing and making "My Species" go viral several times. I would recommend her to poet friends who like Mary Oliver and Mary Ruefle. <3
"In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, / the mushroom scent lingers... / As a person who's once loved completely, / a country once conquered, / does not release that stunned knowledge... / Unburnable mushrooms are other. / They darken the air they come into. / Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken" (38).
Read
August 26, 2024Some of these, like “My Memory” were so visceral to me. Most I struggled to grasp, but I’m going to chalk that up to being out-of-practice with reading poetry rather than anything lacking in the poems themselves. Maybe I will return to these another time. Maybe then I will have cleared enough bottles from the shelves in my brain and made room anew for an old way of seeing.
“…the questions keep being new ones. / Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain / into oranges and olives.” —from “Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied By Rain”
“…the questions keep being new ones. / Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain / into oranges and olives.” —from “Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied By Rain”
March 8, 2021
Reading Hirshfield's work is like watching an Olympic swimmer compete in the 400 butterfly. As they fly through the water with their exquisite grace, you might say to yourself, "Oh. That looks so easy and effortless. I could do that, I think." And then you try. And then, sinking lower and lower in the water, form falling apart into awkwardness, you say to yourself, "Oh. I guess it's not that easy. I guess it's not easy at all.
September 29, 2021
This may be the first poetry book I ever read based solely on a Goodreads recommendation. Hirshfield certainly has her admirers here, and I see the appeal, but it’s not quite my cup of tea. Still, she has a great way with imagery, and there were many individual poems I loved, particularly “Hamper” and “Entanglement.”
October 2, 2024
Rip the phrase “it’s turtles all the way down,” another fallen soldier to John Green.
June 22, 2025
"I know you think I've forgotten
but today
in rain
without coat without hat"
but today
in rain
without coat without hat"
September 29, 2025
rating: 2/5 stars
~
this collection just did not do it for me. i don’t really know if there was a strong theme overall, but either way i was hoping to enjoy it :/
~
this collection just did not do it for me. i don’t really know if there was a strong theme overall, but either way i was hoping to enjoy it :/
March 28, 2022
Nope. No. No. No. Listing objects does not a poet make.
July 25, 2017
A beautiful collection of poems grounded in daily life and in reflection back on the nature of experience; of memory; of unique and shared meaning. I loved it.
One poem:
A Cottony Fate
Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.
Now I too am sixty.
There was no other life.
One poem:
A Cottony Fate
Long ago, someone
told me: avoid or.
It troubles the mind
as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.
Now I too am sixty.
There was no other life.
July 11, 2015
The new collection by this powerfully insightful poet engages the reader.
The first section are a series of "MY" poems, such as My Weather, My Sandwich, etc.
These are quietly amusing images. Many clean, sharp observations of ordinary
objects that turn into meditations. One section is called Twelve Pebbles in which
there are many short, haiku-like poems that are piquant. All her powers are at
play here. A very wise and thoughtful collection.
The first section are a series of "MY" poems, such as My Weather, My Sandwich, etc.
These are quietly amusing images. Many clean, sharp observations of ordinary
objects that turn into meditations. One section is called Twelve Pebbles in which
there are many short, haiku-like poems that are piquant. All her powers are at
play here. A very wise and thoughtful collection.
September 27, 2015
Jane Hirshfield never disappoints---although the poems in the first and last sections were the strongest. The entire collection exudes a Zen influence, using nature and the commonplace to find an emotional and spiritual resignation or reconciliation with the Way of the world.
July 2, 2016
I can't wait to re-read this when I have a cold, in winter, when Chicagoans are outside doing dibs for their parking spaces. This and the peoplescapes of Piero della Francesca, Hirshfield knows intimately.
August 19, 2017
Like all Hirshfield's poems, I take my time reading them--she packs so much in such small spaces! I've marked at least half of these poems with one or two stars in the index (my personal system), and I've underlined countless lines. She's amazing!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 138 reviews