Jane Hirshfield's Ledger (2020)

poems for living in this world. i love Hirshfield a LOT

Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning ecopoet and translator—among other things—born in New York City in 1953; one of the finest contemporary poets we have, in my opinion. Her compositions may seem plain, but they are as perfectly chiselled as a Renaissance marble sculpture, and built on her particular sensibility—political, spiritual, ecological, biological. Her perspective frames even the simplest of images in a way entirely Hirshfieldian, whether she be using that of a bowl or a bucket or a bird. She has long been addressing the state of the world in her poetry, without putting humans on a pedestal but situating them within our shared ecosystem with animals and plants, addressing wars and other man-made horrors. In a 2020 interview to the San Francisco Chronicle for the publishing of Ledger, she said: “These issues of social justice, equality, violence, refugees, hunger have been in my work for decades, but they’ve intensified as a subject in this new book and become very much the center of gravity.”

Hirshfield uses metaphors cleanly, precisely, each poem a small ecosystem of sounds and words and images that echo in each other. Her poems reflect a profound sense of empathy and responsibility towards the world we inhabit, in its totality—people, plants, animals, all considered as parts of a single whole. All of this is conveyed in a firm, gentle, loving voice—almost smiling, even in her saddest poems.

I invite you to read this collection of poems, or even to just read a few of her poems, available online. I chose three and linked them in the Further reading section below. I’ll leave you with two questions and answers from the aforementioned interview by Jessica Zack:

Q: Do you think your younger self would be surprised by how politically engaged you’ve become in your 60s?
A: Well, when I was in college, I fasted for a week for Cambodia. When I was in high school, I disobeyed my parents and snuck out of the house at 3 a.m. to take a train to Washington for an anti-Vietnam protest. So, no, my younger self wouldn’t be surprised. I think what surprises me is that I have in any way a public voice. But the fact that I take some action? That doesn’t surprise me.

Q: There’s a sense of urgency in many of your new poems. Did you intend them to be a call to action, to shake us out of our complacency, whether about climate change, the refugee crisis, war or social injustice?
A: It’s almost simply a call to be one more decibel in the chorus on the side of existence. Of course, that is activism and it is opposition, but it’s also support. It’s wanting to stand in solidarity with one another as human beings, and with the bats, with the bees, with the fish, with the trees. A lot of the work of activism that this book is doing is bringing attention to the ways we are responsible actors for this Earth and for one another, and out of that arises a rather fierce sense of responsibility.

Further reading

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes: One of my favourite poems from her, contained in Ledger but first published in the New York Review of Books in 2017. It’s also available here at poets.org.

Vest, 2017. Contained in Ledger, first published in The Times Literary Supplement. Available here at poets.org.

Let Them Not Say, 2014. You can read it here.

Jane Hirshfield’s biography on poets.org, containing a chronography and, among others, a beautiful quote about her by fellow poet Kay Ryan:

She is that rare thing in contemporary American life, a true person of letters—an eloquent and exacting poet, first, but in addition the author of enduring essays and influential translations and anthologies. Now add to this a life on the hustings, bringing the good news about poetry to nearly every state of the union. Then further add her elegant ambassadorship for poetry in the greater world (think Japan, Poland, China) and you have something that satisfies the old sense of a person of letters—a writer who demonstrates in every possible way that this life matters.