The Asking: New & Selected Poems
by Jane Hirshfield
Knopf, 2023
Most new-and-selected volumes give me pause. Why this poem, not that one? Why order the poems that way, not the other ways? Sometimes I think: too soon, or too big, or both. Unsurprisingly, Jane Hirshfield’s new and selected, The Asking, is not among them.
True, The Asking’s tome-like girth might intimidate. Especially in hardback. At 368 pages, it weighs in just shy of a pound and a half. The average length of a Hirshfield poem spans about a page. Do some poet-math, and…that’s a lot of poems. Her poems’ brevity allows for an expansive yet representative collection. I gave myself the assignment of reading The Asking in one sitting. I would fail, but when? About halfway through, something better than failure happened: I forgot I was reading while I was reading. I don’t get that engrossed too often, so when the spell of healing amnesia ended, I felt something like sadness reaching for gratitude.
Hirshfield has arranged The Asking chronologically, almost. Twenty-nine new poems open the collection before it flashes back to 1973’s Alaya and her subsequent collections. With the exception of Alaya Hirshfield selects liberally from each of them. I found myself doing a lot of back-and-forth page-turning as I kept hearing echoes across poems written decades apart. And that, in my estimation, is the chief virtue of a new-and-selected: recontextualizing poems, making the old new, and thrusting the new into the open.
The new poems contain Hirshfield’s obsessions, among them: solitude, the natural world, Eastern philosophy, an imperiled biosphere, an engagement with science, and a political conscience. Her strategies, too, remain loyal: intense observation, brevity, intellectual acuity, the lyric mode, and an imagist’s sensibilities. Then she refines it all through her decades-long Zen Buddhist practice, which often produces epiphanic flashes wrapped in a virtually ego-less lyricism. She manages this, in part, through a prosody that teases out quiet realizations on the cusp of expression. No doubt influenced by Zen Buddhism, Hirshfield often builds her poems around silence. But for Hirshfield, the caesura is not merely a pause, but a place of fluid, flexible, immeasurable quiet. Her voice distinguishes itself through how she maneuvers within and around those animated moments of negative space. In Hirshfield’s hands, the caesura leaves enough space for the reader to contribute to meaning-making. Hirshfield is not, however, a “Zen Poet,” whatever that is. I prefer to approach her poems as though they are a transcript of lyrical meditation during which her spiritual and poetic practices converge. After all, they shadow and inform each other and enable Hirshfield to translate abstractions into poems that literally make sense: appealing to our senses through imagery often cerebral and sensual. Think Wallace Stevens doing yoga instead of selling insurance. And kinder.
As longtime readers of Hirshfield know, and as The Asking makes clear, each new Hirshfield book has come bearing the weight and gift of transformation— be it a landscape, a loss, an emotional center, an epistemology, a pandemic. True too for her newest poems written during COVID quarantine. To call them “COVID poems” limits them (and it sounds just awful), but it may help evoke when and where these poems come from. In “Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” Hirshfield bears witness to the freighted emptiness of that sudden, interminable moment when quarantine became mandate but not yet reality:
Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.
It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service.
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
I’m fascinated by the opening couplet: it reveals not the poet’s temperament, but the reader’s. This is how Hirshfield puts it in a 2020 interview with Ilya Kaminsky: “What a reader does with invisible ink is his or her mirror, revealing that reader’s mind, predispositions, and heart.” Returning to the poem, if I register the tone as glib, I’m in trouble. But, if I take Hirshfield at her word (“I am not an essential service.”), and celebrate the rescue sincerely, then there’s hope.
After all, it’s never about just the ant. And that day’s newspaper is not just another day. So, our attention diverts to what is near, and the ant,
…must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer—warm—
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Here, the poem takes an essential risk with some preciousness, and Hirshfield brings it right to the edge. A well-practiced imagist can play with that fire. Exhibit A: if an ant as text birthed from the printed daily news doesn’t suspend your cynicism, then I’m wondering what brought you to poetry in the first place. As the speaker considers the ant, she tries to fill the gaps of its story and her place in it:
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.
March 17, 2020
So much depends upon a specific date. If the reader somehow missed the COVID references— “shelter in place,” “essential service,”— this date should provide enough context to re-appreciate the poem, which, despite its atmosphere of stasis, contains consummate pacing. Of the poem’s thirty-three lines, only four are enjambed, yet the poem never stutters or stalls. The varied line lengths create a calm unsteadiness, a rhythmic grasping that undergirds a poem whose very subject gives us, repeatedly, pause.
Other new poems call overtly back to earlier poems. “Solstice,” a new poem, almost insists to be read alongside “December Solstice, ’73” from Alaya, her first book. “Solstice” begins:
The Earth today tilts one way, then another.
And yes, though all things change,
this night again will watch its fireflies,
then go in to a bed with sheets,
to lights, a beloved.
To running water cold and hot.
Now, “December Solstice, ‘73”, written about fifty years earlier:
The days will be getting longer now.
Outside it is raining and raining.
We spoke so much with the same voice,
how will they tell us apart?
One voice, many mouths,
we are many even alone.
The similarities between these poems’ opening stanzas are many: their subjects, declarative observations, meditative voice, each free verse line endstopped. They may also distract us from what has changed. Whereas both begin in the present, only “Solstice” stays there, working through the present moment by moment. “December Solstice ‘73” looks back. “Solstice” has no we; fireflies are fine companions, but one can’t “go into a bed of sheets” with them. The “we” in “December Solstice, ‘73” has dissolved, and that loss makes the past subsume the present. What the speaker sees in that past is obscured. The rest of the poem reads:
But when the time came,
it darkened & rained through my tongue.
My sleep has the texture of canvas, waiting.
You go out to the streets,
and try to bargain,
driving your life like a nail, deep into time.
I was wrong:
we were foreigners in the same country,
trying to weep.
To her credit, Hirshfield rarely works anything construed as personal into her poems. “December Solstice, ‘73” demonstrates this. It reads like a poem by a gifted, young poet who has, possibly, stumbled upon a subject for which she has no language…yet. The “you” matters, but not to the reader. And, I hear you, Reader: it isn’t fair to pick on this poem. I’m actually applauding Hirshfield for including it. She was 18, maybe 19 when she wrote this. Among the less seasoned moments sit lines that shine, like:
And learning ourselves
like a hard to decipher book,
we will each come away with separate meanings,
friend.
Now, this reads more like Hirshfield, circa 2023. Quite a stanza for someone who hasn’t lived her life yet. The uneven lineation is perfectly paced: each line not so much endstopped as broken off, each line outpacing the one before it until it all gives way and crashes on “friend.” The stunning simile that closes the poem makes it worth returning to, if only as an artifact of budding genius.
Returning to “Solstice,” then, reveals how Hirshfield has mastered these latent talents. Unlike, “December Solstice, ’73,” the voice in “Solstice” changes, and doesn’t strain doing so. Listen to the rest of the poem:
Take nothing for granted,
you who were also opulent, a stung cosmos.
Birds sing, frogs sing, their sufficient unto.
The late-night rain-bringing thunder.
And if days grow ordinarily shorter,
the dark’s mirror lengthens,
and one’s gain is not the other lessened.
Urgency overwhelms observation that, once distilled, proffers wisdom. Therefore the imperative (Take nothing for granted…) replaces the declarative (The days will be…). This subtle, massive shift in voice ought to have the reader asking what just happened? What causes the voice—therefore, the poet’s entire attitude and understanding—to change? Who can say? I can’t, and I don’t have to because I’m not immune to time. Therefore: why can’t this poem be “about me” as well? Maybe Hirshfield began this poem fifty-some years ago, and preserved it in caesurae. All I can say with certainty is that Hirshfield returns to the caesura for recuperation, observation, and transformation.
Other poems that speak directly with earlier work include her “Pebbles” poems (collections of even shorter poems), or what Hirshfield identifies as “individual poems written independently.” Hirshfield, also in the aforementioned Kaminsky interview, points out how they,
…do draw from Asian poetry’s concision and compression, but are more discursive. They draw also from Novalis, from a few pieces in Pound’s Personae, from fragments of poems from ancient Greece and early poems from Sumer and India, Turkey, and Mesoamerica. They draw from a handful of very short poems by Brecht I find irresistibly precise.
The Asking includes five “Pebbles” poems, and the last two—“Chrysanthemum” and “Vestment”—are my favorite:
Chrysanthemum
it doesn’t need to know its own fragrance
~
Vestment
for the pear, for the fig,
no difference
they ripen
even in ashfall
I admire these two because they use the intensity of physical sensations to make intellectual and metaphysical arguments lyrically. In a word: imagery. Throughout all of her work, Hirshfield’s imagery consistently dazzles. The “Pebbles” poems showcase her at her most concentrated, most overtly Eastern-influenced. She is no imitator of those influences. Still, I hear Basho loudest, maybe because I was reading Hirshfield’s essay, “Seeing Through Words: An Introduction to Basho, Haiku, and the Suppleness of Image” from Ten Windows alongside The Asking. In that essay, Hirshfield reminds us that,
Bashō’s haiku, taken as a whole, conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said and known by image. When the space between poet and object disappears, Bashō taught, the object itself can begin to be fully perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence is made larger. “Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote. The statement foreshadows by three centuries T. S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.
Some of her assessment of Basho applies to herself as well, especially when she’s at her concentrated best.
Hirshfield’s abilities to compress a poem are evident and impressive. But when a poem, or its occasion, requires more space, and more words within that space, she adjusts her strategies and purpose. One such occasion is the elegy. Hirshfield’s elegy for the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who died in 2021, makes its largeness felt despite its relative brevity. And though her grief is hers, Hirshfield also includes us in that grief. Hirshfield’s elegies are more public-facing than private-wailing. This is most evident in the second stanza where echoes of Auden’s elegy for Yeats may remind one of the elegy’s communal origins:
A new saeculum opened—however briefly—its windows.
You loved and were loved.
Your poems became themselves fully.
Also, more sad.
The third line unapologetically wears its influence on its sleeve. In Auden’s hands, Yeats “…became his admirers”; in Hirshfield’s hands, Zagajewski’s “…poems became themselves fully.” The intensity of Eastern influenced compression is replaced by the universal force of grief, but what else can be said? Merely, the obvious: “Also, more sad.” Poems need to do this: strip themselves of ornament and pay homage:
Is it now—already so quickly?—for you
as you once imagined for poets then already dead?
“Their doubts vanished with them,” you wrote.
“Their rapture lives.”
Giving Zagajewski the last word in his own elegy is the only way to end it, and Hirshfield demonstrates the humility and care to do so.
Another elegy among the new poems sounds very different notes of grief. Brief and mammoth, here is the whole poem:
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.
Great pain. Then, aftermath. Dickinson’s wooden way and quartz contentment are translated through Hirshfield as an indifferent dusk. Even routine is stripped of comfort and replaced with apathy: fork = eat; shoes = fit; time = passes; a last breath = a death. It’s the distance that hits me hardest here. Where is the speaker? There isn’t one, really, not in the poem. The effect is chilling. And tender. Death, after all, is something to “receive,” but like wine tasted, not enjoyed. Anything more, however intensely felt, would be noise. It’s a restraint beyond instruction, yet it’s remarkable for its ability to reveal how grief can be, must be beautiful.
Were The Asking a bit shorter, I wonder if its strengths and pleasures—of which there are many—would be greater: the brevity’s intensity more palpable, the silences roomier, the imagery even more enduring. Hirshfield’s poems demand attention because attention is their source and song. If her poems are taut, her vision is wide, deep, and patient, like a tree’s. Her poems never fail to show us how,
It is not enough
to see only the beauty,
this light
that pools aluminum
in the winter branches of apple—
it is only a sign
of the tree looking out
from the tree,
of the light looking
back at the light,
the long-celled attention.