The Asking: New and Selected Poems

by Jane Hirshfield

The long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” ( The New York Times Magazine ), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed our bonds of eros and responsibilities to the planet; the singing dictions and searchlight dimensions of perception; the willing plunge into an existence both perishing and beloved, dazzling “even now, even here”

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.
In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection—drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing—brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.
With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.

Genres: Poetry

368 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2023

About the author

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.

Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.’

With quiet precision and vastness of grace, Jane Hirshfield crafts profound and empathetic poetic explorations of life amongst the natural world and the metaphysical questions of existence. A new Hirshfield poem is always cause for celebration, and with The Asking: New & Selected we not only get a new batch of gorgeous poetry but also a much needed selected volume from across Hirshfield’s prestigious career. Hirshfield is easily one of my favorite living poets, once praised by the late, great W.S. Merwin for her ability to make words ‘move like light beams-searching, discovering, pausing to make sure,’ and her poems offer such intricate and tidy philosophical insights that they often leave you awash in their beauty for years to come. This volume offers the best from across nine volumes of poetry (her most recent being Ledger in 2020) and many new poems such as the one from which the collection takes it’s title saying ‘don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.’ Such statements are the heart of her works, addressing the dualities of life where ‘one's gain is not the other lessened,’ facing the inevitability of death and embracing our temporality in this world teeming with plant and animal life, asking us not to despair yet making space for sadness and grief as much as joy and tenderness. ‘A thought is a forest’ that comes alive through her words that reach, like tree branches, into the reader’s soul. This is a perfect collection for those looking for an introduction to this amazing poet and a lovely reminder of her entire career with plenty new to find for long-time readers, but either way it is a celebration of a poet that has always been dear to my heart.

The Weighing

The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

‘Poetry is the language that foments revolutions of being,’ says Jane Hirshfield and it is because ‘it is based on a thoroughly lived life.’ I find reading her poetry to be like looking at the world anew, discovering mysteries I’d not known existed before and finding deeper understanding of those already pressing. Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz wrote that ‘her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness,’ which is a perfect summation. Hirshfield spent 8 years of study at the San Francisco Zen Center and this comes across through her prose as the surface simplicity of her work sends our minds into a deeper harmonization with life in a way that is unbelievably inviting and comforting even in the darker moments. As she writes in her poem The Supple Deer, ‘to be that porous, to have such largeness pass / through me, is a feeling we as the reader experience engaging with her work. Her work often looks at ideas of duality, such as life and death, and this comes across brilliantly with much of her clever wordplay. For instance, in the poem Of Yield and Abandon she writes ‘There is something that waits inside us, / a nearness that fissures, that fishes,’ though I also just find so many of her phrasings to lodge themselves forever in my mind. The lines ‘A day is vast./ Until noon./ Then it's over.’ lives rent free in my head every time I wake up early and hope to get a lot accomplished before noon.

Door and Sentence

My life,
you were a door I was given
to walk through.

Dawdling
in lintel and loosestrife as much as permitted.

Your own glass knob,
I spoke you:

A sentence, however often rewritten,
ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged preposition,
sometimes, for mercy, hidden.

Hirshfield has written as many essays on poetry as she has poems its seems, and I often find her insights there to be just as stunning. In a 2023 interview with NPR Hirshfield discusses how, for her, poetry is ‘an attempt to see from more than one point of view in more than one way, to enlist the collaboration of tongue, heart, mind, body, everything I have ever experienced, and to try to write into an awareness which is larger than the everyday, walking around forms of thought.’ I find this quite lovely. She continues that poetry is not ‘anger towards certain decisions which are made in the halls of power,’ but quite the opposite.

‘Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is it imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship, to find something I didn’t know until the poem was written and finished? And then I know something new, and I have been changed.…poems are vessels of transformation. They are the glass crucible that a chemical reaction takes place in. And what comes out at the end is a different thing than what went in at the beginning.’

I think we feel this way when we read her for sure, finding ourselves transformed and seeing the world in new ways.

Ripeness

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.

Life and death, naturally, become the biggest stage for transformation in her works. She writes about death in a way that reminds us how natural it is, being less something to be feared and more just another stage we all encounter. A favorite of mine is the poem A Standing Deer which concludes with a passage comparing our lives vanishing into death like deer passing in a field. Here are the final two stanzas:

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

Hirshfield often plays with ying-and-yang dualities, or contrasting yet complimentary ideas such as the house growing either cluttered or sparse, being both empty and filled, or, as in ’Nothing Lasts’: ‘Grief and hope / the skipping rope’s two ends’, these two ideas having their interplay at the heart of her work. In these dualities we are reminded that much of life is what we make of it, or as she says in One will feel this as a blessing, another as horror’. There is the grief that she--we all--disappoint others, and the inevitability that everything will be taken from us. But, as common with Hirshfield, this doesn’t lead to despair but rather an acceptance of temporality that is beautifully embedded in the image of a deer seen out the window.

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

In her later poems, particularly the collection Ledger, we begin to see her investigations of death become more personal in an look at accepting that one day she must ‘walk into the time that is coming’ because ‘a great darkness is coming / a both eyed darkness’ of our inevitable deaths. ‘Little soul, / the book of your hours / is closing.’ She discusses in an interview that writing this collection also made her aware the environmental concerns that permeate her poetry was also becoming more dire. ‘ I had been writing about climate for a long time. I had been writing about the imperiled natural world for a long time. But it became urgent when it became clear it was no longer future. It was here. ’ We see this increased intensity in this collection, which fits with the poems about death and more political matters to make for a rather haunting read.

Let Them Not Say

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.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

The new poems to be found in this collection are wonderful as well (the poem earlier, Door and Sentence is from the new works) and have a rather optimistic flair to them. We have poems of the Solstice, being out in nature, a day that seems worth living if all one did was save a single ant, and even a poem to late poet Adam Zagajewski. Hirshfield has been publishing since 1971 and has only gotten better.

‘I would like
to add to my life,
while we are still living,
a little salt and butter,
one more slice of the edible apple,
a teaspoon of jam
from the long-simmered fig.

To taste
as if something tasted for the first time
what we will have become then’

I cannot express how wonderful The Asking: New & Selected is, how joyous it is to hold a career of such beauty and power in one binding along with new gems to enjoy. I must simply recommend trying it for yourself, to bask in the glow of her words and get lost in the forests of her thoughts. It is a marvelous place to be.

5/5

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a
tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, fias.
all this resinous, unretractable earth.

[Rob Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Partly due to my ongoing efforts to write poetry, I try to read at least a couple of poems a day and towards that end will often pick up and wend my way through a poetry anthology (this one took me 1.5 months to get through).

At a recent poetry workshop I attended, the presenter shared and discussed Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Changing Everything”, which I found to be well written and thought-provoking, so I decided to pick up a collection of her work.

Of the hundreds of poems included in Hirshfield’s “The Asking”, a dozen or so were excellent and really spoke to me (a few of these, to my surprise, I had encountered earlier in my life). The ones I really liked were those that, first and foremost, I could actually understand and also that used language and structure in interesting ways and that moved me and/or made me think about how I viewed the world. The parts of these poems worked individually and then came together into satisfactory wholes.

The majority of her poems, however, fall into the category of what I might call expertly written poems that I just don’t get. These may have parts I can appreciate (interesting images, metaphors, thoughts, moods, observations scattered here and there) but wholes that leave me perplexed and cold, uncertain what is being communicated or why/how the lines/images are linked together.

In my experience, Hirshfield’s poetry is not unique in this way. A lot of modern poems strike me similarly. They are skillfully done in terms of technique and language usage, but ultimately mystifying and unsatisfactory. When I see such poems in respected publications, I a). wonder why, and b). realize I will never have one of my own poems in such a publication 🙂.

That being said, the poems that did work (for me) were excellent. When I think about those great poets whose work I admire, it’s usually a handful of their poems that really grab me, while many of their other works do not have that same effect.

So to find a poet with ten or more poems you like is no small thing, and the fact that the rest of their poems don’t elicit a similar response is perhaps not all that important.

The poems that really stood out to me (four- or five-star poems) include:

“Today When I Could Do Nothing” p. 10 (written during Covid, I believe, which is when I read it, too)

“A Day Just Ends”, p. 18

“Invocation”, p. 47

“Autumn”, p. 91

“The Weighing”, 93 (except for the part about the eland…I’m not fond of personification of animals except for
humor and fantasy’s sake or in children’s stories where it can be brilliant!)

“Meeting the LIght Completely”, p. 96

“Changing Everything”, p. 113 (the one the workshop leader shared)

“Nothing Lasts”, p. 161

“A Cedary Fragrance”, p. 166

“My Species”, p. 266

[Remembering Ramiyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good morning I was just checking to make the Great Test to get a Test done on Monday morning to get you a href and I can get it in your mailbox tomorrow if we can make it in your office or on your phone and then you will need a new phone and the Summer That you are going through a href and you will be able and the Summer That you are going through a href and you will be able and the

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first reading of Hirschfield’s actual poetic work; read her excellent book on poetry ‘Ten Windows’ a while ago; not all the poetry in this collected volume speaks to me but at times she hits the mark;

“A Day Just Ends for H.H. (1922–2020) A day just ends. Its dusk comes simply, without opinion or hesitation. A fork still fits hand, shoes fit feet, on this day, like any other. She closed her eyes, opened her mouth to receive the end of her life. Its last tasting.”

“The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.”

“In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”

“Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable, against all that is not: You are there. I am here. I remember.”

[Pablito · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote the word it, the word is.

I entered the debt that is owed to the real.

Forgive
spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider,
octupus lifting
one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver,
that in such black ink
I set down your flammable colors.

-from "My Debt",

which closes this poetic journey of a life-long "witness." A witness that reminds the reader throughout that we are part of nature, not its focus. And while I do not feel qualified or worthy of reviewing the opus of Jane Hirshfield, I would urge anyone who would like to get in closer touch with their humanity to read any poem in which horses feature prominently . . .
among them, "After Work," "Heat," "For What Binds Us," and "The Love of Aged Horses."

Thank you, Jane Hirshfield, for the witness, the "flammable colors."

[Emelie Karlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.”

Finns inget bättre än att läsa klart en diktsamling och sen gå tillbaka och kolla vad man har annoterat

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

CHINA
Whales follow the whale-roads.
Geese, roads of magnetized air.
To go great distance, exactitudes matter.
Yet how often the heart that set out for Peru
arrives in China. Steering hard.
Consulting the charts the whole journey.

That is one of my most favorite poems ever, and this was a magnificent overview of Hirshfield’s work with some new poems also. Her voice and topics can vary but heart, soul, nature, sorrow, grief are always in every poem, and I can’t imagine any other person who can address those things in so many ways and show us how important we are, how important the earth is, and how we are one.

SALT HEART
I was tired, half sleeping in the sun. A single bee delved the lavender nearby,
and beyond the fence, a trowel’s shoulder knocked a white stone. Soon,
the ringing stopped. And from somewhere, a quiet voice said the one word.
Surely a command, though it seemed more a question, a wondering perhaps—
“What about joy?” So long it had been forgotten, even the thought raised surprise.
But however briefly, there, in the untuned devotions of bee and the lavender fragrance,
the murmur of better and worse was unimportant. From next door, the sound of raking,
and neither courage nor cowardice mattered. Failure—uncountable failure—did not matter.
Soon enough that gate swung closed, the world turned back to heart-salt of wanting,
heart-salts of will and grief.

LAKE AND MAPLE
I want to give myself
utterly
as the maple
that burned and burned
for three days without stinting
and then in two more
dropped off every leaf;
as this lake that,
no matter what comes
to its green-blue depths,
both takes and returns it.
In the still heart,
that refuses nothing,
the world is twice-born:
two earths wheeling,
two heavens,
two egrets reaching
down into subtraction;
even the fish
for an instant doubled,
before it is gone.
I want the fish.
I want the losing it all
when it rains and I want
the returning transparence.
I want the place
by the edge-flowers where
the shallow sand is deceptive,
where whatever
steps in must plunge,
and I want that plunging.
I want the ones
who come in secret to drink
only in early darkness,
and I want the ones
who are swallowed.
I want the way
the water sees without eyes,
hears without ears,
shivers without will or fear
at the gentlest touch.
I want the way it
accepts the cold moonlight
and its it pass,
the way it lets
all of it pass
without judgment or comment.
There is a lake,
Lalla Ded sang, no larger
than one seed of mustard,
that all things return to.
O Heart, if you
will not, cannot, give me the lake,
then give me the song.

DOOR AND SENTENCE
My life, you were a door
I was given to walk through.
Dawdling in lintel and loosestrife
as much as permitted. Your own glass knob,
I spoke you: A sentence, however often rewritten,
ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged
preposition, sometimes, for mercy, hidden.

COUNTING, NEW YEAR’S MORNING, WHAT POWERS YET REMAIN TO ME
The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
…
For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question. The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised.
…
Today, I woke without answer. The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— don’t despair of this falling world, not yet  didn’t it give you the asking

O, RESPONSIBILITY
On one side, irretrievable spires and cobbles, ladders, arpeggios, boletes, apples, oysters, lists and languages lost under sand. On the other, what can be wrestled with still, reconnoitered, returned to, repaired.
I asked to be lush, to be green. I pressed myself to the clear glass between wanting and world. I wanted to be lush, tropical, excessive. To be green. On the glass that does not exist, small breath-clouds rose, dissolved. A creature of water, I found myself. Tender, still also of air. The dry bark of trees sequestered the hidden rising. I told my grief: patience. I offered my want the old promise— a tree not wet to the touch is wet to the living.
“A map grows no trees.” —Alberto Blanco Yet a thought is a forest. Birds knock their heads against living tree trunks, looking for living beetles. This continual concussion must be why sureties so often confuse. Moss on the north side, leaves going up, roots going down, and still for a lifetime I’ve kept getting lost.

POEM TO BE WRITTEN BY MAGNET IN OIL FOR AN EXHIBIT AT THE MUSEUM OF TOMORROW IN RIO DE JANEIRO
A human heart, sent into exile from all its wanting,
might ripen like that, into some small-clustered kindness
or a rescuing joke. The way a magnet becomes itself
wherever there’s iron. Plunged into water, set into oil,
it still pulls. A magnet doesn’t have to go into exile
to be a magnet. Put a magnet down anywhere
on this earth, that magnet is home.

MOSSES IN THE MOJAVE DESERT, a translucent crystal offers bryophytes much-needed respite from the heat of the sun. —The New York Times, July 29, 2020
For hypolithic mosses, it seems, four percent of daylight is right. They live, the headline says, by sheltering under a parasol of translucent quartz. The crystal scatters the light’s ultraviolet, dilutes its heat, traps the night’s condensed moisture to moss-sized rain. I think of these mosses and consider. Perhaps we, too, are mosses, evolving to the parch of our self-made Mojaves. Unable to bear the full brightness, the full seeing. To recognize fully the Amazon burning, the Arctic burning, the monarchs’ smoke-colored missing migration. An experiment not meant to last. And yet we found shelter within it, we pondered our lives and the lives of others, thirsted, slept…

I WOULD LIKE
I would like my living to inhabit me the way rain, sun, and their wanting inhabit a fig or an apple. Let me find my life in that, too. In my moments of clumsiness, solitude; in days of vertigo and hesitation; in the many year-ends that found me standing on top of a stovetop to take down a track light. In my nights’ asked, sometimes answered, questions. I would like to add to my life, while we are still living, a little salt and butter, one more slice of the edible apple, a teaspoon of jam from the long-simmered fig. To taste as if something tasted for the first time what we will have become then.

TO HEAR THE FALLING WORLD
Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the light bends in the trees this time of year, so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting.

THE DOOR
A note waterfalls steadily through us, just below hearing. Or this early light streaming through dusty glass: what enters, enters like that, unstoppable gift. And yet there is also the other, the breath-space held between any call and its answer— In the querying first scuff of footstep, the wood-owls’ repeating, the two-counting heart: A little sabbath, minnow whose brightness silvers past time. The rest-note, unwritten, hinged between worlds, that precedes change and allows it.
WITHIN THIS TREE
Within this tree another tree inhabits the same body; within this stone another stone rests, its many shades of gray the same, its identical surface and weight. And within my body, another body, whose history, waiting, sings: there is no other body, it sings, there is no other world.

STANDING DEER
As the house of a person in age sometimes grows cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with, the heart may grow cluttered. And still the house will be emptied, and still the heart. As the thoughts of a person in age sometimes grow sparer, like a great cleanness come into a room, the soul may grow sparer; one sparrow song carves it completely. And still the room is full, and still the heart. Empty and filled, like the curling half-light of morning, in which everything is still possible and so why not.

NOT-YET
I turn my blessings like photographs into the light; over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on: Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken. Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned, not-yet-strewn. Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love: Not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet- Not-yet-not.

OPTIMISM
More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.

METEMPSYCHOSIS
Some stories last many centuries, others only a moment. All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass, grow distant and more beautiful with salt. Yet even today, to look at a tree and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed. There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror. Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door, ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle. Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket gives off— the immeasurable’s continuous singing, before it goes back into story and feeling.

THE PROMISE
I gazed at the range of blue mountains, I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank. Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted. Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted. There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.

[NC · Rating 4 out of 5]

learned of jane hirshfield from her translations. some lines i liked from this:

—
so few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance

—
and then / what is said by all lovers: / “what fools we were, not to have seen”

—
beloved, what can be, what was, / will be taken from us / i have disappointed / i am sorry. i knew no better

—
i want to gather your darkness / in my hands, to cup it like water / and drink / i want this in the same way / as i want to touch your cheek— / it is the same— / the way a moth will come / to the bedroom window in late september, / beating and beating its wings against cold glass; / the way a horse will lower / its long head to water, and drink, / and pause to lift its head and look, / and drink again, / taking everything in with the water, / everything

—
it is / like a woman who goes to the airport / to meet the planes from a country she long ago lived in / she knows no passenger but stands near as they exit / still holding their passports / she breathes in the scent of their clothes

—
a child packs snow around a bit of stone / and throws it at his brother / each recalls this all his life / the one who threw, and the one who cried out in surprise / and whatever there is of love between them includes it

—
and when two people have loved each other / see how it is like a / scar between their bodies, / stronger, darker, and proud; / how the black cord makes of them a single fabric / that nothing can tear or mend

—
sonoma fire / large moon the deep orange of embers / also the scent / the griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, so I only got halfway on this compilation? It's cool. There were a few poems I liked. The writing is good. I didn't connect with this collection.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this outstanding collection, the poet presents her life in rhyme, from the green poetry of her budding youth to the fully ripened fruits of her harvest years. Even the occasional groundfall apple, pear, fig, and quince are savory. Oh, those transfiguring wine grapes! The collection earns a fifth star for Given Sugar, Given Salt and Ledger, which are works of consummate genius.


The Heart As Origami

Each one has its shape.
For love, two sleeping ducks.
For selfless courage, the war horse.
For fear of death, the daylily’s one-day flower.
More and more creased each year, worn paper thin,
and still it longs for them all.
Not one of the lives of this world the heart does not choose.
—from THE OCTOBER PALACE (p. 95)


But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks.
—from “Three Times My Life Has Opened,” in THE LIVES OF THE HEART (p. 117)


The woman of this morning’s mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night’s;
the passionate dreams of the one who slept
flit empty and thin
from the one who awakens.

One woman washes her face,
another picks up the boar-bristled hairbrush,
a third steps out of her slippers.
That each will die in the same bed means nothing to them.
—from “Red Berries,” in GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT (p. 142)


Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese,
roads of magnetized air.

To go great distance,
exactitudes matter.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China.

Steering hard.
Consulting the charts
the whole journey.
—“China,” in COME, THIEF (p. 231)


I wrote the word it, the word is.
I entered the debt that is owed to the real.
—from “My Debt,” in LEDGER (p. 331)


Favorite Poems:

NEW POEMS (2023)
“Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me”
“Solstice”
“To Be a Person”
“A Day Just Ends”
“Thermopolium”
“Poem to Be Written by Magnet in Oil for an Exhibit at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro”
“Silence: An Assay”
“Again, I Enter My Life”
“Mosses”

FOR ALAYA (1971-1982)
“Everything That Is Not You”

GRAVITY & ANGELS (1988)
“Heat”
“Woman in Red Coat”

THE OCTOBER PALACE (1994)
“The Kingdom”
“Happiness”
“Ripeness”
“The Weighing”
“The Heart As Origami”
“The Task”
“Empedocles’ Physics”

THE LIVES OF THE HEART (1997)
“The Adamantine Perfection of Desire”
“Standing Deer”
“Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight”
“Hope and Love”
“Late Prayer”
“Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World”
“Orange Oil in Darkness”
“Wine Grapes for Breakfast”
“Lake and Maple”
“Milk”
“The Poet”
“Three Times My Life Has Opened” *

GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT (2001)
“Red Berries”
“Apple”
“A Hand”
“Habit” *
“Rebus”
“Waking This Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep”
“This Was Once a Love Poem”
“Inflection Finally Ungraspable by Grammar” *
“Pillow”
“Poem with Two Endings”
“Balance”
“A Cedary Fragrance”
“Identity”
“Optimism”
“The Silence”
“Sleep”
“Ink”

AFTER (2006)
“Vilnius”
“The Double”
“I Imagine Myself in Time”
“[Ten Pebbles]”
“The Bell Zygmunt”
“It Was Like This: You Were Happy”

COME, THIEF (2011)
“Sheep”
“The Promise”
“China” *
“Seawater Stiffens Cloth”
“The Present”
“The Perfection of Loss”
“A Small-sized Mystery”
“Contentment”
“The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life.”
“Stone and Knife”
“Suitcase”
“A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes”

THE BEAUTY (2015)
“My Skeleton”
“My Proteins”
“As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail”
“Still Life”
“Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in”
“All Souls”
“Entanglement” *

LEDGER (2020)
“Let Them Not Say” *
“As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us”
“Today, Another Universe” *
“Cataclysm”
“Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes”
“Practice”
“Words” *
“She Breathes in the Scent”
“My Doubt”
“Best”
“Brocade”
“In Ulvik”
“Advice to Myself”
“[Ten Pebbles]”
“Ledger”
“On the Fifth Day” *
“My Debt”

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read a poet new to me it takes some time to get a feel for their work. I have been reading The Asking by Jane Hirshfield for about a month. It has come to the point where every poem I think, this is my favorite. Then, I turn to the next poem and think, this is my favorite.

I have responded to the simplicity of so many of the poems, especially those with imagery from nature that explore the human experience.

Hope and Love
All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one–
no knowing even
that was what he did–
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

Reading on the patio, the ripe apples dropping from the apple trees above me, I read this poem that cleaved my heart.

Ripeness
Ripeness
is what falls away
with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their corm.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested–
this sorrow, that great love–
it too will leave on the clean knife.

The book opens with New Poems, some written during the early Covid days of lockdown. The second poem includes the line which is the title of the book, a New Year’s Day poem in which the world asks, “And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” And the day answers, “don’t despair of this falling world not yet didn’t it give you the asking”

“Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” dated March 17, 2020, Hirshfield writes about saving an ant, removing it from the house, “This first day when I could do nothing, contribute nothing, beyond staying distant from my own kind, I did this.” I remember those days of lockdown when self-isolation was the only weapon we had in our arsenal, feeling my mortality every day. “Mortal, alive among others equally fraught,” Hirshfield writes in “Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That is Fleeting.” And, for a friend who died in 2020, “A Day Just Ends” encompasses in a few lines the last tasting of life.

I have barely begun to encompass Hirshfield’s work, have so many more poems to encounter. This is a volume that I will be returning to again and again.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection begins with new poems (2023) and then sends readers to the earliest selected works — from Alaya (1971-1982). The book continues chronologically after that and by the time I finished, it felt like it was the perfect time to read those new poems again.

My favs from the new: A Day Just Ends and Silence: An Assay.

I admire Jane Hirshfield’s ability to share poems that allow readers to experience the spaciousness of the physical world and also to be brought into the most personal inner experiences. And to run along a timeline, being cloaked in something long gone, provides new light for today.

As I read through, I really enjoyed the repetition in titles indicating a repetition in form. These were, specifically, the assays and pebbles. The assays dig into a concept and turn in unexpected ways, showing more and more of what we might often and easily overlook when using language. The pebbles feel like a recipe’s ingredient list has unexpectedly been met, without ever knowing there was a recipe at all, and now— the poem can be served. Like a pebble, these ones feel like they could fit in your hand.

A mindful and inviting read, spanning decades of work! Highly recommend.

[Marge Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet laureate of science and the biosphere writes a new poem every New Year’s Day. “The greatest happiness is being of service” she said to the crowd at the Wisconsin Book Festival. She wrote a poem written in support of the scientists, who were told on the fifth day of both Trump terms that they could no longer speak in public. That poem led to the birth of Poets for Science, rallying voices from many professions to speak up when our federally-funded scientists could not.

Jane Hirshfield, former horse wrangler, former chef, former truck driver, Zen monk, now writes a Substack so that we can all access the healing she has to offer. In the discussion in Wisconsin, she tackled W.H. Auden’s famous line “poetry makes nothing happen.” “But it can save a life” she said, speaking of the work poetry has done since before literacy in human history.

And Jane Hirshfield’s poems do save lives. She reminds us that poems enlarge our vision. Poems help us bear uncertainty, Poems open our eyes when we are afraid. “The worse things are, the more we seem to need the unclenching of the heart a good poem brings. Literature is an exercise in empathy.” Indeed. And this book does that important work.

https://poetsforscience.org/
https://janehirshfield.substack.com/

[Jack Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved her essays, and found a new-love for her poetry.

There are many lines that resonate with me but couldn’t cut out to be my favourite poems. The ones that do become my favourites, however, were absolute bangers. Here are the titles:

- Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remains to Me
- A Day Just Ends
- Thermopolium
- Silence: An Assay
- I Would Like
- To Drink
- Leaving the October Palace
- Within This Tree
- The World Loved by Moonlight
- Not-Yet
- Hope and Love
- Late Prayer
- Wine Grapes for Breakfast
- Bees
- Lake and Maple
- Rebus
- Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk—
- Button
- Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand
- Ladder
- A Cedary Fragrance
- Identity
- Speed and Perfection
- Sleep
- Sheep
- A Small-Sized Mystery
- A Day is Vast
- Stone and Knife
- Pompeii
- A Hand is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes
- My Weather
- My Life was the Size of My Life
- A Cottont Fate
- As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail
- A Chair in Snow
- Let Them Not Say
- As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on The Floor Above Us
- A Ream of Paper
- Ledger
- On the Fifth Day

[Richard Subber · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is lots to like and lots to pass over in Jane Hirshfield’s poetry.
Most often her style boils down to the “wild child” type, apparently she’s not too concerned with the idea of “the best words in the best order.” Many of her poems strike me as disorderly, albeit enthusiastic.
I think it’s worth reading through Hirshfield’s The Asking collection to get the taste and the occasional warm blast of beautiful insight and intuition. Here’s a taste:
“Stone did not become apple….Yet joy still stays joy.” (from “Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me”)

“She closed her eyes,
opened her mouth
to receive the end of her life.
Its last tasting.” (from “A Day Just Ends”)

“The impossible closes around
like a smooth lake
on an early morning swim.” (“Everything That Is Not You”)

“How sad they are,
the promises we never return to.” (from “Autumn Quince”)

Read my of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[P.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have the hardback, the Kindle version, and Audible version. It used to be the print was all I'd get. But after my stroke flipping through books handling as well. Luckily for me most all publishers of poetry books have made reading easier with line breaks and all, so I've turned to Kindle for my poetry fix.

Well imagine my surprise when I began reading when I noticed an Audible edition was out. Ever curious as I am checked it out. Jane reads so I got it. So it syncs flawlessly with the book as well as with her reading each word. I've never seen this before so it's an advantage to the book.

So i'm still into this book but love Jane's writing and her readings from them. Tr new poems are great and worth getting. I highly recommend this collection for its selected poems.

[CMarie Fuhrman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will admit to not being the biggest Jane Hirshfield fan. Her poems are not the comfortable sweaters and worn pants I slide into when I need to feel accepted. And this is exactly why I read her work. Jane is brilliant. Her poems are probably one step ahead of me. And so I read book after book of her work because I think that this reaching makes me try harder, makes me a better poet. Like that teacher that didn't give you an easy grade just because you try, Jane makes me earn each one of her poems. I am so grateful for this and it is why I will always give her five stars and why I will always read that which makes me a bit uncomfortable.

[Alyson Indrunas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a bit to conquer this one. I now see I need poetry in their original forms. Anthologies are for teaching poetry--something I have not done in decades. This life of mine. Who would have ever guessed.

Favorite poem, as ever.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I greatly admire Jane Hirshfield’s poetry and enjoyed reading this very long collection. After all, she’s Jane Hirshfield, and she was one of many gifted writers who taught me in poetry workshops. I was in awe of her talent back then (about 20 years ago) and remain in awe now. This volume contains new and selected poems, reaching back to 1971. Her poems are rarely long, usually ending on one or two pages, yet her wording is so wise and precise that I read portions over again before moving on to the next piece.

[Domas Pitrėnas · Rating 4 out of 5]

DOOR AND SENTENCE
My life, you were a door
I was given to walk through.
Dawdling in lintel and loosestrife
as much as permitted. Your own glass knob,
I spoke you: A sentence, however often rewritten,
ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged
preposition, sometimes, for mercy, hidden.

THE AWAKENING (my creation to express the feelings after reading it)
And when I read through words of beauty
My heart felt like a singing voice
In which I knew not what to alter
Or who to worship, for whom to fall

[Mary Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've savored my way through this collection one or two poems at a time. Now I'll go back through and make my own index of topics and feelings and mentor texts.

I didn't love all the poems and I didn't "understand" them all. When the bones of reasoning behind how the poems were selected and grouped became apparent, reading this was not just a lesson in poems and poetry, but in the conversation between poems and perhaps Jane Hirschfield's conversation with her own poems.

[Lisa]

My favorite one:

I OPEN THE WINDOW.

What I wanted
wasn't to let in the wetness.
That can be mopped.

Nor the cold.
There are blankets.

What I wanted was
the siren, the thunder, the neighbor,
the fireworks, the dog's bark.

Which of them didn't matter?

Yes, this world is perfect,
all things as they are.

But I wanted
not to be
the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow,
clean sheets untroubled,
dreaming there still might be time,

while this everywhere crying

[Lanette Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful, such talent, yet accessible and touching. I love these poems and this is probably another book I will own one day. The second poem in the book is one of my favorite poems period: it starts by asking what we can do with what remains to us (“a mountain, two hands…”) and ends reminding us one of the things we still have is “the asking.”

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good to read these new poems and to revisit some of the old.
"... I carry this in my body, seed/ in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe,/ But they guard me, these small pains,/ from growing sure/ of muyself and perhaps forgetting."

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Each Happiness Ringed by Lions" is maybe my favourite poem, some days anyway, and Jane Hirshfield is — every day — one of my very favourite poets. This is a terrific gathering of some of Jane's best poems, each of them unforgettable to my mind.

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muchas veces es demasiado abstracta, muchas veces también demasiado críptica. Pero cuando sus poemas se vuelven más concretos, más cercanos a la experiencia humana del vivir y ver, se vuelven luminosísimos. Y hay suficientes de ellos en el volumen.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death."

I really enjoyed this collection.

[Bo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sort of poetry book I always order from the library. But. After reading so many strong poems in this collection I’ll now purchase my own copy.

[Lorne Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sutphen’s language suits her subject matter: plain, almost flat, gently rolling. Rural America of the twentieth century, clearly rendered. Lots of tenderness, just short of nostalgia.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm learning I have a soft spot for simple yet elegant poems about nature, aliveness, conscious awareness, grief, heart, and soul. Beautiful.