Book Review: The Lives of Hearts by Jane Hirshfield

  While having no particular form of poetry she seems to commit to, unlike Shakespeare's beloved sonnet, Jane Hirshfield plays around with a variety of style and forms.



     In her introductory and title poem, “The Lives of the Heart” (pp.3), she uses a wealth of anaphora while somehow managing to not overwhelm the poem. The anaphora actually helps the poem along. This poem, like so many of her others, are punctuation heavy which calls for a lot of starting and stopping.

The anaphoric phrases served to give the lines a better flow and connection with the other lines.  The use of enjambment, which
many poets tend to use for flow, in this particular poem is something that Hirshfield seems to avoid for the most part. Although lines flow into lines, she uses punctuation almost to a fault and the commas, semi-colons, and periods add definite stopping points and pauses to stagger that flow. It's an odd kind of fit, but it works.

However, in “Clappered Heart” (pp. 23), Hirshfield's use of enjambment and very short meter, pushed this poem along at a fast clip.

     While she is not too picky about the poetic forms and styles she uses in her poems, Hirshfield is very strict to one. Metaphor. Her poetry is very visual and her heavy use of metaphor adds to you being able to see the words. As in the poem “Mule Heart” (pp.11):

Both empty,
it will come to your shoulder,
breathe slowly against your bare arm.
If you offer it hay, it will eat.
Offered nothing,
it will stands as long as you ask.

Everything she writes about is a metaphor and most, an enigma. If I didn't know that the underlying meaning or purpose of each poem was the heart or it “lives”, I might never understand a few such as “Da Capo”, “Each Happiness Ringed by Lions” and “Noon Bells, Lake Como”. I am not typically a big metaphor lover. There are a few I did rather enjoy, though.


      “The Lives of the Heart” is full of metaphor. Once you realize, however, that the title of this poem is part of the poem, you realize the true beauty of the work. The title line is not just the first line of the poem, by default, it is also the invisible beginning of each line. I really loved that. My favorite lines are the beginning;

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tailed reed.

Hirshfield's poems often begin with something solid and real (as the heart is muscular, chemical and can be ligneous) then goes into a metaphorical description of the object at hand as in “The New Silence”(pp. 10):

There are times
when the heart closes down,
the metal grate drawn
and padlocked,
the owner's footprints covered by snow.

This is also clear in the poem, “The Heart's Counting Know Only One” (pp. 7)

In Sung China,
two monks friends for sixty years
watched the geese pass.
Where are they going?
One tested the other, who couldn't say.
That moment's silence continues.

The heart can close down. Two monks can watch geese and test each other. But most hearts don't have metal grates and padlocked and moments of silence do not last forever. Hirshfield does seem to love a good riddle.

      “The World Loved By Moonlight” (pp. 12) is my favorite poem of the collection. This is in part because I can understand it. This poem is simple, short, and to the point. I also like it because it is eloquent and visual in six short lines. I love, “ It is the bodies of gods; cast in bronze,/ braced in stone...”. I enjoy any poem that can evoke emotion and a feeling of, “I heard that!” in a very simple and straight to the heart kind of way.

  
  The sensual quality of Hirshfield's work was lovely: the cricket walking across her papers (pp.17), “yellow amber stripped of lightless,/ scent of cold leather” (pp. 35), “Gold of winter's sun grows thinner and thinner”(pp. 91).

Overall, Jane Hirshfield's poetry is not quite my cup of tea. I prefer my poetry on the classical side and much more straight forward; Shakespeare, Byron, E. E. Cummings, Frost, Poe, etc. However, for the poet who would like to study and/ or write metaphorical, somewhat ethereal poetry, Hirshfield is a good pick.
This review is copyrighted by Faith D. on October 31, 2010.  Please do not copy this work without prior written permission of the author.  Thank you.

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