Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Celebrated as an anthologist (Women in Praise of the Sacred, etc.), Hirshfeld seeks wisdom in the introspective occasions everyday life provides for this fifth collection. As in The October Palace, Hirshfeld's stripped-down diction and hushed sentences attend to her speaker's psychic losses and transformations: "For a year I watched/ as somethingÄterror? happiness? grief?Ä/ entered and then left my body." "Dream Notebook" wrests a new-seeming subject from an old lyric quarryÄnot our dreams, but the way we forget themÄwhile other poems consider household objects ("Pillow," "Ladder") in novel ways. Hirshfeld, who has also published a prose work on religion and poetry, uses Buddhism to inform a number of moving, straightforward lyrics and verse-essays (on "Clocks," "Ink," and "Sleep"). Elsewhere poems appeal to autobiography ("I, a woman of forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples") or take up, along with the speaker's overt self-consciousness, the powers and limits of poetry: "Does a poem enlarge the world,/ or only our idea of the world?"; "Why is it so difficult to speak simply?" A few such questions can go a long way, and Hirshfeld relies on their diffuse power too often: this long book of short poems might have been better shorter. A more serious flaw is Hirshfeld's dependence on Louise Glck's characteristic modes: the chilly, interior inquiries and flat declarations will seem very, very familiar to the latter's readers. Yet if Hirshfeld rarely surpasses her model, she uses it well: always accessible and on occasion profound, her new work will likely add to her large circle of admirers. (Feb. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Poet, essayist, anthologist, and translator Hirschfield has infused her fifth book of poetry with the pensiveness of middle age. Amid the comfort of familiar things "the dog, the blue coffee mug" there is the disconsolate sense of life passing and the melancholy sloughing off of former selves: "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." Hirschfield sees her life not as a static condition but as a fluid, changeable medium: "As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,/ we become our choices." Over and over, Hirschfield attempts to speak clearly and plainly while acknowledging the difficulty perhaps the impossibility of doing so. In her Zen-influenced attempts to reduce poetry to the essential statement, she is frustrated with her too-human failures. In one very likable poem called "Button," she envies a button for its invulnerability to that unattractive emotion: "A button envies no neighboring button,/ no snap, no knot, no polyester-braided toggle./ It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard." These are assured, controlled poems that tread carefully where others have trampled. They should be enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib. LLP, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Hirshfields fifth collection, and, as with her previous work the poems are simple, almost ascetic in structure and vocabularyyet quite complex in meaning. (To borrow a phrase popular on Madison Avenue, they comprise a high-attention product.) Yet, unlike some of her academic contemporaries, Hirshfield does not engage in intentional obfuscation. Her purpose is rather to elucidate, and she does so with almost blinding clarity and sincerity. While she mentions Tu Fu and Li Po, she does not cotton to the faux Zen koans currently in vogue whose great truths sound like dialogue paraphrased from Kung Fu reruns. She has found her own truth and fashioned her own vessel for conveying it. Her specialty is the everyday objecta button, a pair of scissors, a spoonand their circle of simple, passionate thusness, their hidden rituals of luck and solitude. While the philosopher may contemplate nature through detachment, Hirshfield gains her knowledge through familiarity, even intimacy, with it. The resultant verse is therefore sensual rather than austere. And because she is not entirely embarrassed to be human, she offers poems based on a soulful resignation to lifes dilemmas as opposed to a merely intellectual renunciation of them. Not to make her work too forbidding, it must be stressed that these poems are highly accessible. Their sense, however, does not come to one in an epiphanous flash. Rather, it seeps into one's consciousness, like the aftertaste of some delectable morsel.
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