Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

By Jane Hirshfield

"Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives.

Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions in 2005, followed by After in 2006 (which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Come, Thief in 2011 and The Beauty in 2016.

‘Jane Hirshfield’s poems praise the ceaseless mutability of life as its central splendor…with habits of perception quite different from what our poetry customarily offers’ – William Matthews

‘Hirshfield’s lucid poems are philosophical and sensuous, concise yet mysterious… Wittily deductive and metaphysically resplendent, Hirshfield’s supple and knowing poems reflect her long view, her quest for balance, and her exuberant participation in the circle dance of existence’ – Donna Seaman, Booklist"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Dec 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780374055

Jane Hirshfield

The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Book preview

JANE HIRSHFIELD

EACH HAPPINESS RINGED BY LIONS

Selected Poems

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives.

Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

Bloodaxe published her retrospective Each Happiness Ringed by Lions in 2005, followed by After in 2006 (which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Come, Thief in 2011 and The Beauty in 2016.

‘Jane Hirshfield’s poems praise the ceaseless mutability of life as its central splendor…with habits of perception quite different from what our poetry customarily offers’ – William Matthews

‘Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human’ – The Scotsman

COVER PAINTING (DETAIL)

Still Life with Fruit and Carafe by Pensionante del Saraceni

(Roman, active c. 1610/1620)

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON

(SAMUEL H. KRESS COLLECTION)

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Each Happiness

Ringed by Lions

SELECTED POEMS

For Carl

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This first UK edition of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is drawn from her five US collections: Alaya (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1982), Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), The October Palace (HarperPerennial, 1994), The Lives of the Heart (HarperPerennial, 1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001).

Epigraph from Yehuda Amichai translated by Yehuda Amichai and Red Hughes. The epigraphs from Dante and Praxilla are in English versions by Jane Hirshfield.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

FROM

Given Sugar, Given Salt(1997-2001)

The Envoy

Mathematics

Red Berries

The Room

Apple

A Hand

Habit

Rebus

Waking This Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep

Poem Holding Its Heart in One Fist

Leather

This Was Once a Love Poem

Dream Notebook

Button

Always She Reads the Same Translation

Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak

Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk –

Inflection Finally Ungraspable by Grammar

Linnaean Problem

All Evening, Each Time I Started to Say It

In Praise of Coldness

A Cedary Fragrance

The Lie

Happiness Is Harder

The Gallop

Pillow

‘Nothing Lasts’

Great Powers Once Raged Through Your Body

‘A Carbon-based Life Form’

Minotaur

Ladder

Blue Window

Muslin

Walker Evans Interior, 1936

Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand

Self-portrait in a Borrowed Cabin

The Contract

Poem with Two Endings

A Scale Weighs the Outer World in Pounds and Ounces

Bone

Moment

Elephant Seals, Año Nuevo Preserve

Rock

One Life Is Spent, the Other Spends Us

August Day

Balance

Identity

For Horses, Horseflies

Speed and Perfection

Optimism

Five-legged Chair

Tree

Silk Cord

The Silence

Sleep

Clock

Ink

Metempsychosis

FROM

The Lives of the Heart(1994-1997)

The Lives of the Heart

I.Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark

The Heart’s Counting Knows Only One

Not Moving Even One Step

Secretive Heart

The New Silence

Mule Heart

The World Loved by Moonlight

Salt Heart

On the Beach

Abundant Heart

Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark

Standing Deer

Da Capo

The Adamantine Perfection of Desire

Irreversible Heart

Heart Pressing Further

II.Not-Yet

Not-Yet

The Gift

Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight

Leaf

Studying Wu Wei, Muir Beach

Hope and Love

Painting

The Fire

Manners/Rwanda

Late Prayer

Calmness

Respite

Orange Oil in Darkness

The Four-Postered Beds of Mycenae

Jasmine

III.The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs

The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs

Noon Bells, Lake Como

Changing Everything

Bees

Mulberries

Mele in Gabbia

Wine Grapes for Breakfast

The Bearded Woman

Lying

A Month of Days and Nights

Love amid Owl Cries

The Clock

IV.Each Happiness Ringed by Lions

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World

Letting What Enters Enter

Lake and Maple

Knowing Nothing

If the Rise of the Fish

Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn

The Poet

White Curtain in Sunlight and Wind

A Room

One Penny

Cabin

The Illuminist

Broken-off Twig Budding Out in the Path

Blind Fate Walking on Ice in the Woods

Matter and Spirit

Spell To Be Said Upon Waking

Spell To Be Said Before Sleep

Spell To Be Said After Illness

Spell for Inviting-in the New Soul

Spell To Be Said Upon Departure

Lion and Angel Dividing the Maple Between Them

Milk

Talc

Each Happiness Ringed by Lions

Three Times My Life Has Opened

FROM

The October Palace(1988-1994)

The Kingdom

I.What the Heart Wants

What the Heart Wants

Each Step

The Shadow

Cycladic Figure: The Harp Player (ca. 3000

B.C.E

.)

History as the Painter Bonnard

The Wedding

A Plenitude

Narcissus: Tel Aviv, Baghdad, San Francisco; February 1991

‘Perceptibility Is a Kind of Attentiveness’

In the Year Eight Hundred

A Recurring Possibility

Floor

The Hawk Cry

Autumn

What Falls

The Door

II.The Answering Yes

1973

Happiness

This Love

Inspiration

The Love of Aged Horses

Percolation

The Groundfall Pear

A Breakable Spell

The Water Diamonds

The Task

In Yellow Grass

Even the Vanishing Housed

III.The October Palace

A Sweetening All Around Me As It Falls

Of the Body

The Thief

Leaving the October Palace

Ripeness

The Weighing

Meeting the Light Completely

The Gods Are Not Large

The Heart As Origami

An Earthly Beauty

Within This Tree

Empedocles’ Physics

The Stone of Heaven

FROM

Of Gravity & Angels(1982-1988)

I.To Hear the Falling World

After Work

In a Net of Blue and Gold

Invocation

To Hear the Falling World

Dialogue

Justice Without Passion

The Song

Woman in Red Coat

Heat

II.For What Binds Us

Of Gravity & Angels

I Have No Use for Virgins

Tonight the Incalculable Stars

For What Binds Us

III.The Other Earth

November, Remembering Voltaire

Proteus Entering Water

Evening, Late Fall

October 20, 1983

On Reading Brecht

Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape

The Pattern That Connects

Toward the Infinite

With Singing and Banners

Autumn Quince

Childhood, Horses, Rain

Lullabye

FROM

Alaya(1971-1981)

The Stream of It

Those Chinese Poems

Like Salt

Everything That Is Not You

December Solstice ’73

And

Biographical note

Copyright

from

GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT

(1997–2001)

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.

Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left.

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something – terror? happiness? grief? –

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives

of which we know nothing.

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Mathematics

I have envied those

who make something

useful, sturdy –

a chair, a pair of boots.

Even a soup,

rich with potatoes and cream.

Or those who fix, perhaps,

a leaking window:

strip out the old cracked putty,

lay down cleanly the line of the new.

You could learn,

the mirror tells me, late at night,

but lacks conviction.

One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.

I look at this

borrowed apartment –

everywhere I question it,

the wallpaper’s pattern matches.

Yesterday a woman

showed me

a building shaped

like the overturned hull of a ship,

its roof trusses, under the plaster,

lashed with soaked rawhide,

the columns’ marble

painted to seem like wood.

Though possibly it was the other way around?

I look at my unhandy hand,

innocent,

shaped as the hands of others are shaped.

Even the pen it holds is a mystery,