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A review by seebrandyread
The Beauty: Poems by Jane Hirshfield
5.0
Today's collection, The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield, put me in a meta state of mind. It's sort of a foil to yesterday's because, while also divided into sections, each poem has a title, though the sections do not. This absence of section titles led me to try to decipher the reasoning behind the division. What do the poems in each group have in common? How do they relate? What connects them? This is similar to the job of the poet in finding how to link disparate images (aka metaphor), how might one memory meet another, what lies in liminal space? In other words, by causing me, the reader, to think about these connections, I somewhat wear the shoes of the poet.
The title of the collection is a nod to art (and poetry) in itself. Art is considered a way to capture and present beauty when it describes something beautiful, but it also creates beauty--a poem is an object that is somehow both tangible and not. Beauty usually has facets that can be sensed with the eyes, ears, skin, etc., but these are often accompanied by something not measurable or verifiable. Something in the heart or the soul, however cheesy that sounds.
Hirshfield's poems ask, indirectly, what beauty is. She writes about sandwiches with the same care and consideration as the human body and packs as much punch and artistry into 2 lines as into 20. The collection seems to move from more concrete territory in the first section (mosquitoes, her wallet, a corkboard) to the very abstract in the final sections. She finds beauty in the simple and the complex but also shows that beauty is often both.
Though few if any of these poems fall under a certain form (at least that I'm aware of), Hirshfield does reference the ode and the riddle. Some poems are praise poems of objects or ideas while others, if left untitled, would require the reader to guess the subject. A few of these poems are subtitled as "An Assay" or analysis/investigation. In this way she places herself alongside her reader again: as she examines her subject, we examine her poem.
The title of the collection is a nod to art (and poetry) in itself. Art is considered a way to capture and present beauty when it describes something beautiful, but it also creates beauty--a poem is an object that is somehow both tangible and not. Beauty usually has facets that can be sensed with the eyes, ears, skin, etc., but these are often accompanied by something not measurable or verifiable. Something in the heart or the soul, however cheesy that sounds.
Hirshfield's poems ask, indirectly, what beauty is. She writes about sandwiches with the same care and consideration as the human body and packs as much punch and artistry into 2 lines as into 20. The collection seems to move from more concrete territory in the first section (mosquitoes, her wallet, a corkboard) to the very abstract in the final sections. She finds beauty in the simple and the complex but also shows that beauty is often both.
Though few if any of these poems fall under a certain form (at least that I'm aware of), Hirshfield does reference the ode and the riddle. Some poems are praise poems of objects or ideas while others, if left untitled, would require the reader to guess the subject. A few of these poems are subtitled as "An Assay" or analysis/investigation. In this way she places herself alongside her reader again: as she examines her subject, we examine her poem.