THE poetry of Jane Hirshfield, collected in ten books over the past forty years—starting with Alaya (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1982) and continuing through The Asking: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming in September from Knopf—have brought solace to private darkness and courage to public action; they have borne witness to refugees, terrorism, and our era’s failures and fractures, along with the joys, griefs, and perplexities of the poet’s own life. They have become anthems of biosphere and climate as well as staples at weddings and memorials. In addition to her ten poetry collections, Hirshfield has published two much-treasured collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), and four books presenting world poets from the past, including Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (HarperCollins, 1994). At her work’s core is the abiding recognition of connection, mirrored in the life. Over the course of seven decades—she turned seventy in February—Hirshfield has been a restaurant cook, a lumber truck driver, and a monastic, lay-ordained in Soto Zen. She has read her poems on every continent except Antarctica and taught widely at Stanford University, the University of California in Berkeley, Bennington College, Queen’s University Belfast, and elsewhere. Her TED-Ed animated video on metaphor has received 1.4 million views. Her abiding hope? “To repay my debt to oxygen, mountains, and fish.”
While reading I had the sensation of walking through my own life. It was acute, distinct. When she described a tree, it was a tree I knew; the field, one I had walked in; the bird calls were those of the birds in the persimmon tree in my front yard. It was not only the familiarity of the northern California landscape in her poems that
