From Vol. 28:3

THE BEAUTY, Jane Hirshfield. Alfred A. Knopf, The Knopf Doubleday Group, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, 2015, 107 pages, $26 cloth, knopfdoubleday.com.

Read only the first five lines of Jane Hirshfield’s gorgeous new collection, The Beauty, and you’ll get a taste of what’s to come—an inviting tone of wonderment, an exploration of intimate spaces, a thoughtful consideration of the body’s feats and limitations, and an observant speaker who remains open to the world’s gifts and possibilities:

A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.

This first poem, “Fado,” provides a satisfying entryway to The Beauty. Set off structurally as the only poem in the book given its own section, “Fado” resonates in the white space and its final word—balance—introduces us to another of the book’s central concerns. Describing a woman singing in a wheelchair, Hirshfield writes that her song…

…puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.

The idea of balance—perhaps informed by Hirshfield’s Zen Buddhism and its practice of equanimity—reappears throughout the book. Even the cover’s “Still Life with Peaches” is a study in balance: Two peaches of the same size, color, and ripeness sit in the same plane, each anchoring half of the black background. One peach, however, looks especially alive, still attached to its leafing, reaching branch; the other, stemless one, in comparison, seems especially dormant. In her poem, “How Rarely Have I Stopped to Thank the Steady Effort,” Hirshfield notices, …they keep trading places, / grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living. Grief and gladness, the dead and the living: Hirshfield’s often spare poems expand wide enough to embrace this book’s balanced consideration of both.

The world’s copper bowls hold in equilibrium our births and deaths, our comings and goings. “Things Keep Sorting Themselves,” as Hirshfield reminds us in her poem of that title:

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,
milk know it’s milk?
No.
Something just goes and something remains.

Later in the same poem, she acknowledges, Nobody plans to be a ghost. Confounding as a sleight-of-hand trick, our essential transience—in Hirshfield’s wise words—becomes both truth and beauty.

Weighing self against loss of self like two sides of a scale, the title of Hirshfield’s recent limited-edition Missing Links Press chapbook—Minus/My-ness—also echoes the magician’s “Now you see it, now you don’t.” The Beauty includes a number of poems from the chapbook in its first full section—titles like “My Skeleton,” “My Proteins,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” the speaker conducting a kind of case study of the self in each poem by looking in- and outside the body for evidence of its strengths and weaknesses, its limitations and loves, its youth and age.

Picking up with a conversation woven through Come, Thief, her previous book, Hirshfield in The Beauty weighs the subjects of life and death in the context of aging, commenting, Now I too am sixty (“A Cottony Fate”). Picking up with a structure also echoed in previous collections, Hirshfield includes here a sequenced poem in short, titled sections called “Twelve Pebbles.” Readers familiar with her past “Seventeen Pebbles” and “Fifteen Pebbles” sequences will be delighted to find these wise words again at the heart of her new book. The section “Making & Passing” ends the sequence:

New new new new new
bluster the young birds in spring.
An old branch holds them.
Generation.
Strange word: both making and passing.

Just as one word can contain both making and passing, so too—Hirshfield assures us—can one life. On any given day, we’re offered some of each—youth and age, joy and grief; Hirshfield’s poems are gentle reminders that beauty lies in that balance.

Jennifer Richter’s second collection, No Acute Distress, was named the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and will be published in Spring 2016. Her first book, Threshold, was selected as an Oregon Book Award Finalist by Robert Pinsky. She’s currently Visiting Poet in Oregon State University’s MFA Program.