{"id":363,"date":"2012-03-14T22:18:18","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T22:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=363"},"modified":"2012-03-14T22:18:18","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T22:18:18","slug":"review-of-come-thief-by-jane-hirshfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/14\/review-of-come-thief-by-jane-hirshfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Come, Thief<\/em> by Jane Hirshfield
\nKnopf, Cloth $25<\/p>\n

Reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n

In her now-classic book of essays on the craft of poetry, Nine Gates<\/em>, Jane Hirshfield writes, \u201cSolitude, whether endured or embraced is a necessary gateway to original thought: only a writer who fears neither abandonment nor self-presence can write without distortion.\u201d As one might expect from a longtime student of zen, Hirshfield\u2019s latest collection, Come, Thief<\/em>, rings with a fearless clarity and an attention to language that never wavers. She\u2019s always pursued both depth and simplicity in her previous volumes, which include Given Sugar, Given Salt<\/em> (2001) and After<\/em> (2006), and though the poems of Come, Thief<\/em> again ask for our patience, they repay it more than ever with work that marries the abstract with the concrete: \u201cLet reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains,\u201d she tells us in one of her koan-like lines, suggesting \u201creason\u201d has little place in her work and in our lives. It\u2019s the mystery she\u2019s after.<\/p>\n

Hirshfield is thus most compelled by the spaces between things, the unexpected gaps between thoughts or the too-often unacknowledged world beneath the world in which we live. \u201cUnder each station of the real\/another glimmers,\u201d she says in \u201cIf Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are the Fishes,\u201d and we can easily agree with both first line and title, for it is, after all, the pursuit of truth and beauty that often brings us to poetry in the first place. Always peering beneath \u201cthe stations of the real,\u201d she is never didactic, confessing instead: \u201cI make these words for what they can\u2019t replace.\u201d Seeking to honor the ineffable because she has no choice, she also owns up to the failures inherent in any attempt to capture the truth, since words can never actually \u201creplace\u201d the actual things they do their best to describe.<\/p>\n

Speaking of that slimmest window between decision and action, she says:<\/p>\n

The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.<\/em>
\nThe green coat on old copper weighs more.<\/em>
\nYet something slips through it\u2014<\/em>
\nlooks around,<\/em>
\nsets out in the new direction, for other lands.<\/em><\/p>\n

The best writers linger over every word, each line break and segue from image to image; Hirshfield is clearly one of our most precise, careful poets. And Come, Thief<\/em>, with its flawless construction, is the kind of book that can inhabit you, can even begin to color how you see the particulars of the world (\u201cCoffee cups, olives, cheeses,\/ hunger, sorrow, fears\u201d). These poems wear a kind of detached delight on their sleeves. \u201cSo it was,\u201d Hirshfield tells us in \u201cFirst Light Edging Cirrus\u201d:<\/p>\n

when love slipped inside us.<\/em>
\nIt looked out face to face in every direction.<\/em>
\nThen it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.<\/em><\/p>\n

The speaker seems to have fallen in love again, but it is the spiritual life she mostly interrogates here\u2014that ephemeral \u201cthing\u201d that has filled us, she suggests, since the beginning. And because Hirshfield is just as concerned with human emotion as she is with the transitory, Come, Thief<\/em> never veers too far toward the sentimental or facile. It is with humor and seriousness both that the poet makes use of the temporariness she sees in almost everything. \u201cPerishable, It Said\u201d finds its speaker looking:<\/p>\n

now at the back of each hand,<\/em>
\nnow inside the knees,<\/em>
\nnow turning over each foot to look at the sole.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,<\/em>
\nthen at the arguing jays . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Searching for the \u201cdate to be used by,\u201d she\u2019s also rebelling against the way we often take note of ruin and approach the idea of death: we look first outside of ourselves. This speaker, however, begins by examining the places on her own body as if for the telltale ink stamped there, for some sign when she might \u201cexpire.\u201d The last stanza thus registers the surprise we find so often throughout this book:<\/p>\n

How suddenly then<\/em>
\nthe strange happiness took me,<\/em>
\nlike a man with strong hands and strong mouth<\/em>
\ninside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.<\/em><\/p>\n

As Hirshfield well knows, it is in moments of physical passion and connection that we are most vulnerable, \u201cperishable,\u201d most keenly aware of our own mortality, even as the body wants to keep those \u201cstrong hands and strong mouth\u201d forever alive. Though she writes with assuredness, the impetus of her work is really a deep ambivalence, the expression of uncertainty and groundlessness, which are of course hallmarks of many Buddhist teachings. Maybe her \u201cstrange happiness\u201d at observing the coming and going of things makes this book such a slow pleasure. \u201cSheep\u201d manages, for instance, to be both devastating and heartening, a delicate balance:<\/p>\n

A black-faced sheep<\/em>
\nlooks back out at you as you pass<\/em>
\nand your heart is startled<\/em>
\nas if by the shadow<\/em>
\nof someone once loved.<\/em><\/p>\n

Neither comforted by this<\/em>
\nnor made lonely<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In so many places too, she seems to be talking about her own work. Referring to the futility of translation (and thereby of writing) as well as the uselessness of clinging to anything, she asks us:<\/p>\n

But what is the point of preserving the bell<\/em>
\nif to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?<\/em>
\nA body prepared for travel but not for singing.<\/em><\/p>\n

What is the point of \u201cpreserving\u201d a body or that body\u2019s perceptions? Hirshfield is constantly acknowledging the impossibility of immortality even as her poems seem to seek it.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, one cannot help but admire a poet whose honest work asks us to pause and think, to marvel at the small delights of this world, while also questioning the nature of its existence. Come, Thief<\/em>\u2014though heady\u2014is an invitation, \u201cthe path to the doorway,\u201d as she puts it in the title poem, even if we must unlock that door ourselves. At each turn in this exquisite book, it\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield Knopf, Cloth $25 Reviewed by James Crews In her now-classic book of essays on the craft of poetry, Nine Gates, Jane Hirshfield writes, \u201cSolitude, whether endured or embraced is a necessary gateway to original thought: only a writer who fears neither abandonment nor self-presence can write without distortion.\u201d As one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[31,38,56],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-jane-hirschfield","tag-nine-gates","tag-zen-poetry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}