From Publishers Weekly
Serious, prayerful and governed by quietly sweeping abstract lines, Hirshfield's sixth collection of verse continues the meditative direction established in 2001's well-received
Given Sugar, Given Salt. She subtitles many poems "an assay," meaning both a try and an exposition: the sky, the words "of " and "to" and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe all become such discursive test cases. Some assays are prose poems, a form that balances out Hirshfield's tropism toward restrained wonder. The tone overall, however, inclines decisively toward sadness and grief: the poet aspires "to live amid the great vanishing a cat must live,/ one shadow fully at ease inside another." Hirshfield brings a plainspoken American spirituality (think of Mary Oliver or Robert Bly) to bear on her interest in East Asian practice: a set of quite short (one to five lines) lyric efforts, under the collective title "Seventeen Pebbles," pares Hirshfield's sensibility to a Zen concision. A longer Japanese-influenced poem concludes, "slowness alone is not to be confused/ with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens." Clarification makes for consolation in this gentle and very unified book.
(Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* A number of the finely measured and carefully weighted poems in Hirshfield's stirring new collection carry the subtitle "An Assay," meaning a trial or attempt, a study of characteristics, an analysis to determine the presence or absence of certain components. This is precisely what Hirshfield performs in poems constructed as cleverly and economically as riddles as she ponders the nature of hope, envy, certainty, and possibility. Intrigued with language's concealments and revelations, she has also crafted a series of provocative poems about how ordinary words--
of, and, to, once--embody the workings of our minds. Keenly aware that there is much in the universe we're unable to detect and that we have little control over our fate, Hirshfield considers amplitude and chance in poems of exquisite restraint and meticulous reasoning, including a striking meditation on the paradoxical richness of spareness that can serve as her
ars poetica. But these poems are not abstractions, they abound in earthly wonders: animals and leaves, rivers and snow, sky and rust. Hirshfield even calls her short poems "pebbles," and, indeed, they send ripples across the reflecting pool of our collective consciousness.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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