A book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named "among the modern masters" (The Washington Post).
Ledger's pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw"), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion, has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate.
Jane 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.
With poems smooth and succinct, Ledger is a tender tap on the shoulder, a voice that says “look at this” and “look at that.” Ledger catalogs losses, hidden gains, surprises, rhythms of an aging spirit—found in streams, trees, floorboards, buckets, pockets and birds.
Moving, evocative poems of the world, minutely observed. I especially liked the ones that grieve for the environment, express frustration at injustice, and question our existence.
This one, called My Debt:
... Forgive, spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider, octopus lifting one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver that in such black ink I set down your flammable colors. -- Jane Hirshfield
I just heard another writer say this week that people don't read poetry books from beginning to end; they just jump around in them. Well, that's just not true! And Jane Hirshfield's books are one of the best cases in point. Her books, and particularly this one, are carefully constructed, and go from one place to another. The reader grows and changes as he moves through the book.
Yes, Hirshfield has gone higher and higher in my pantheon of contemporary poets over the last decade. She is able to assume the prophetic mantle without effort; I doubt if she even thinks about it. At times she can sound like a gentle Old Testament prophet. This book begins with a poem that is already becoming kind of famous:
Let them not say: we did not see it. We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it. We heard.
Let them not say; they did not taste it. We ate, we trembled.
She moves on through visions of the world, troubling visions. She responds to the wars and the perversion of language that allows for wars. She writes poems that are clearly informed by her Buddhist practice. She has poems of exquisite observation, like she has had for all of her writing life. She has poems of obvious metaphor that sound something like wisdom literature. Like "Snow":
Little soul, for you, too, death is coming.
Was there something you thought you needed to do?
Snow does not walk into a room
and wonder
why.
And then, perhaps best of all, there are the poems that feel like metaphors, but they are metaphors that are deeply mysterious. Hirshfield leaves us with that sense that the world is bigger that we can ever understand. And she does it with incredibly few words, just a few brushstrokes, that often seem considered for a very long time.
There were a few poems that really struck me in this collection, but many that did not. I've liked several of Hirschfield's short, quippy poems - the ones that deviated from this form were unfamiliar and harder to connect to.
O Snail, wrote Issa, climb Fuji slowly, slowly.
Hirschfield at her best in O Snail! <3
Brain feeling scattered. Need to take better notes as I read.
This is the second time I have fallen in love with a poet’s work as displayed on twitter (single poems, no collection mentioned), then bought or borrowed an available collection and been disappointed. These poems of Hirschfield’s in Ledger are quite different from those I read on Twitter. A lot of them I can’t seem to connect with and that’s not because they are dense with obscure references either. For the most part they are lighter and seemingly accessible yet in a lot of the poems, I can’t get what she is driving at. Does that make me stupid or are Hirshfield’s life experiences so different from mine, even though we are contemporaries, that we have no common ground?
I am therefore only going to pick out the few poems I enjoyed and understood. (Some I understood but did not connect with).
A Bucket Forgets Its Water is eloquent in its simplicity. And the poem Chance darkened me, particularly the last stanza:
“I did not keep walking. The day inside me, legs and lungs, kept walking.”
The gentle poem, Today, Another Universe, about the felling of a large tree, I can really relate to.
My favourite poem Words, I will quote in its entirety.
“Words are loyal. Whatever they name they take the side of. As the word courage will afterward grip just as well the frightened girl soldier who stands on one side of the barbed wire, the frightened boy soldier who stands on the other. Death’s clay, they look at each other with wide-open eyes. And words-that love peace, love gossip-refuse to condemn them.”
I do like the longing of the poem, “She Breathes in the Scent,” and the succinctness of A Folding Screen. Also, Cataclysm with the final line of:
“The fed consider the hungry and stay silent.”
In Ulvik, I enjoyed. Here are the opening lines:
“I, too would like to work as a gardener in my own orchard.”
I do really like My Contentment. Here it is in its entirety:
“I reject contentment: Into it, certain inexperienced saints have been seen to vanish, in a burst of somewhat cloudy light.”
And the straightforward, Harness and I Said. Two of the poems that are very short, but much more effective than many of her longer ones.
I do applaud Hirschfield’s climate change poems and there are many in this collection but I do think that the collection as a whole just doesn’t hang together. Yes, it is broken up in sections but the stylistic variations in each just feel jarring. I can’t finish this review though, without mentioning, On the Fifth Day one of the last poems in the collection. It is powerful and speaks eloquently of how we have lost our voice speaking against climate change. Three and a half stars.
i Love Jane Hirshfield so very much. just. soooo very much. i hope to be more articulate in a future time that is not now about how GOOD her poems are, but in the meantime: JANE HIRSHFIELD I LOVE YOUUUUUUU
Very disappointing in comparison to Hirshfield's previous work, The Beauty. The poems here are spares, minimalistic, but instead of coming out shimmering pearls of resonance, they mostly come off as slight and forgettable.
This is the kind of poetry I most like. Short, full of images that build to a final line that makes you think, ‘Wow. How come I never noticed that before?’
“A writer’s capital is language, which, it seems, is as slippery as any other kind of wealth, as potentially cursed if held without nuance, as transient, as bluntly and inextricably subjective. A briefly borrowed inheritance; a street-found penny.”
Jane Hirshfield's poems on life, love, loss, the environment, and the brilliance of the everyday. I found this collection soothing and at times surprising in its honesty.
3.5 stars. many of the poems deal with issues such as war or the climate crisis, and especially the poet's ambivalent role as a bystander. oftentimes, this is achieved by swerving from a scene of natural beauty or domestic ease into something darker. for example, the poem "Homs", which goes from:
White pelicans, which do not resemble the spirit, write their single sentence straight through it, unhindered. Their rowing wings dipped long ago into some inkpot.
to a description of a desolated "no-longer city" shot on a Russian drone, concluding that:
No fish-teeming world nor its spiralling wings can redeem this.
(No feather, shell, word, image redeem this.)
we see this technique also in "Day Beginning With Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes" and "Practice", where a woman doing pushups counts instead of numbers "the names of incomprehension: Sanford, Ferguson, Charleston. Aleppo, Sarajevo, Nagasaki." and finds that at the end she has grown no stronger.
these poems, especially the ones about the environment (see "Today, Another Universe") are the most compelling ones in the book. a lot of them are found in the first half of the collection, which for that reason i found stronger than the second.
hirshfield's ambivalence towards her ability and usefulness in bearing witness is part of a larger sense of self-deprecation in the collection. multiple poems deal with, essentially, human hubris. humans have such narrow understanding, often limited to just ourselves, and yet we think we are the centre of the world! we impose our meanings on the world, and think it's the other way around!... is what i got out of the book. lines like these abound:
from "Cold, Clear":
Stars, wind, day, might, pine bark. They don't need us.
They don't need to be stars, wind, day, night, pine bark.
and from "Falcon":
How close to human must the breathed-in air come before it develops a sense of shame or humour?
and from "Branch":
A clock does not have hands, a face, tell anything, rightly or wrongly, least of all time.
An empty branch does not long for its nondescript bird.
The bird is not the quick dash that holds separate the world's Yes from the world's No.
i thought that the book could probably be trimmed, since there were a few moments that came off... smartier than what the content warranted. like, i'm not fully sold on lines like "a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net" or the poem "My Silence" which is, of course, a blank page. in general, the more ~ metaphysical ~ poems in the second half, such as the "Little Soul" sequence, kinda fell flat for me.
in general, however, the language is interesting and enjoyable while not making the poems too inaccessible. a decent read
———
Now A Darkness is Coming
I hold my life with two hands. I walk with two legs. Two ears are enough to hear Bach with.
Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the other.
Now a great darkness is coming. A both-eyes darkness.
I have one mouth. It holds two words. Yes, No, inside all others.
Yes. No. No. Yes.
I say yes to these words, as I must, and I also refuse them.
My two legs, shaped to go forward, obedient to can't-know and must-be, walk into the time that is coming.
Some a little mundane, which I can’t decide is a comment on the poems themselves or just that I’ve been reading a lot of poetry from people who don’t think like I do. i.e., hirshfield is a white American scientific-thinking female, so of course we will think along the same lines, so the poems would be simpler-feeling and relatable. On the other hand, I could simply be being pretentious and thinking that poems about noisy apartment neighbors are boring and not “””deep”””” enough. Whatever. I’m still working on my poetry literacy.
Particular poems/lines I liked: Let Them Not Say Day Beginning With Seeing The ISS... “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn’t changed yet.” Today, Another Universe “Today, for some, a universe with vanish. First noisily, then just another silence.” In Ulvik Nine Pebbles “This body, still walking. The wind must go around it.” Amor Fati Ledger “For the exiled, home can be translated “then”, translated “scar”” Ghazal For The End Of Time
enough old white women comparing vague crises of refugees/race/ethnicity/climate to their birdfeeders please 🙏🏼 “breathes in the scent” and “a ream of paper” are delightful poems though
read on two flights, london —> bos & bos —> london
Not my favorite, but there were a few poems I liked. I REALLY liked the First Draft interview with Jane Hirshfield, though, and it was nice reading the poems she talked about in the podcast (especially "In Ulvik". That might be my favorite). Her favorite subjects in this collection seem to be life (animal and human), nature, the end of the world, and the climate crisis. For me, Hirshfield's poems either feel much too simple or much too complicated. I don't like to read things like "A woman speaks to me/ of a paw-paw tree.// I have never seen a paw-paw tree./ I have never eaten its fruit.// I nod./ The conversation continues." It can feel like the lines are short to force them to sound deep, even though they're not saying much. And then there are poems so vague or clumsy or complicated that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from them. There were a few stars - "Ledger", for one, which rhymes slightly and was delightful because of it. And "Amor Fati" I loved. Hearing Hirshfield read her poems on the podcast was helpful - they're read very slowly and you get more of a sense of the FEELING of each one. And to be fair to this collection, I was skimming a lot. (Which is okay. One does not have to read a poetry book straight through.) I'm going to keep the book and maybe return to it in a few years to see if I feel the same way. Or I might never read it again haha, but I'm glad I tried it once!