Nick Rosza

Award-winning poet and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of several collections of verse, many of which are influenced by her practice of Zen Buddhism and knowledge of classical Japanese verse. In addition to her own published collections, which include Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) and After (2006), Hirshfield has translated works by early women poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) and in Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). Inspired by both Eastern and Western poetry, Hirshfield’s work often utilizes a short form and hinges on a turning point or moment of insight. “Such moments arise in Hirshfield’s own poetry,” asserted Common Boundary reviewer Rose Solari. “There is a wholeness, a sense of completeness in her work.”

Hirshfield published her first poem in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton as a member of the university’s first graduating class to include women. She put aside her writing for nearly eight years, however, to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being,” the poet told Solari. “I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.” While Hirshfield does not use Zen terminology in her verse, she once told Contemporary Authors that “it is my hope that the experience of that practice underlies and informs it as a whole. My feeling is that the paths of poetry and of meditation are closely linked—one is an attentiveness and awareness that exists in language, the other an attentiveness and awareness that exists in silence, but each is a way to attempt to penetrate experience thoroughly, to its core.”

After completing her studies in Zen in the early 1980s, Hirshfield began to write and teach, earning numerous grants and awards throughout the remainder of the decade. Her work has been inspired by a series of influences in both the Eastern and Western traditions: “Greek and Roman lyrics, the English sonnet, those foundation stones of American poetry Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, ‘modern’ poets from T. S. Eliot to Anna Akhmatova to C. P. Cavafy to Pablo Neruda—all have added something to my knowledge of what is possible in poetry,” Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. Equally influential have been classical Chinese poets Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Han Shan; classical Japanese Heian-Era poets Komachi and Shikibu; and such lesser known traditions as Eskimo and Nahuatl poetry.

The poems in Of Gravity & Angels (1988), Hirshfield’s second collection, most often depict nature. “The beauty and reassurance of the natural world constantly infuses Hirshfield’s work with freshness,” remarked Frances Mayes in the San Jose Mercury News. In Contemporary Women Poets, essayist Allen Hoey also commented on the influence of poet James Wright on Hirshfield’s work; several other critics have noted the theme of transcendence in Hirshfield’s verse. “Lyrical, attentive to color and light, precise in focus and in naming, this godless but holy book sanctifies the homely and the here-and-now,” pronounced poet Emily Leider in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Concrete and wedded to the tactile world, the poems give off an other-worldly beauty and resonance.” Mayes commented: “Hirshfield is a strong new talent. Her sensibility is lyric, and her intellect is as sharp as any ax in her toolshed.”

In 1987 Hirshfield began collecting sacred verse by women after the poet and translator Stephen Mitchell asked for her help in compiling his anthology of sacred verse. “I had a feeling that women had always written about these things and that it was just a matter of finding them,” she explained to Joan Smith of the San Francisco Examiner. “It was like a treasure hunt.” The result of Hirshfield’s research, Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, spans the centuries from 2300 B.C. to the early 1900s and includes the work of seventy poets from many cultures, spiritual traditions, and social classes. “The Ink Dark Moon and Women in Praise of the Sacred were each done in the effort to make more widely known the work of historical women poets whose words I found both memorable and moving, able to enlarge our understanding of what it is to be human,” Hirshfield explained to Contemporary Authors. “They were also done to help counteract the lingering myth that there were no historical women writers of significance.”

Hirshfield described her next volume of original poetry, The October Palace (1994) as “about awareness, about waking up to the substance and sensuousness and depths and wideness of our existence.” The book encompasses an even wider set of references than her previous collections—from Zen monks to modernist painters. Hirshfield’s “knowledge never seems donned like a valedictory robe…but [instead] serves to illuminate recesses of thought,” according to Hoey. Summing up The October Palace, critic Pam Houston wrote, “[Hirshfield’s] poems are honest and beautiful, sensuous and clean, as full of passion as they are full of grace, as risky as they are wise.” Hirshfield’s next books, The Lives of the Heart (1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) were also highly praised. Given Sugar, Given Salt was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Georgia Review, Judith Kitchen touted the volume: “It’s about how to negotiate the difficulties of living while, at the same time, paying homage to what life has to offer. The poems are penetrating; they reveal a quick intelligence and an even quicker intuition. One senses that Jane Hirshfield has achieved a kind of precarious balance in which the optimism tips the scale. Everything is fleeting—the poems are suffused by this knowledge—but even though ‘today’s yes is different from yesterday’s yes,’ the answer is still in the affirmative.” Hirshfield’s sixth collection, After, was published in 2006 to further acclaim. The book was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and named as one the year’s best by The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. Reviewing the book for the Washington Post, Steven Ratiner lauded Hirshfield as one of “the modern masters of simplicity,” adding “in the case of her best work, the poems are so open-hearted and marvelously conceived that they are not just beautiful themselves but effortlessly contain beauty…What’s more, they make us suddenly aware of what we too contain at every savored moment of the day.”

In addition to her verse publications, Hirshfield has also written a collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997). Based on lectures or adapted from previously published essays, Hirshfield’s prose touches upon such subjects as originality, the nature of metaphoric mind, translation, and the psychological shadow. Praised by Booklist contributor Donna Seaman as an “enlightening volume [that] does exactly what Hirshfield hoped it would: it intensifies our response to poetry, hence to life.” The nine essays cite numerous examples from familiar works written in English, as well as from Japanese works in translation (Hirshfield does not read Japanese). “With her feet firmly planted in both the Western and Eastern canons, Hirshfield delivers a thorough and timely collection on our relationships to poetry, our relationship to the world, and everything in between,” maintained a Publishers Weekly reviewer in praise of Nine Gates.

Hirshfield once told Contemporary Authors: “My primary interest has always been the attempt to understand and deepen experience by bringing it into words. Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world…I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body.”