Fifty Books Project 2023

The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield

A man reaches close

and lifts a quarter

from inside a girl’s ear,

from her hands take a dove

she didn’t know was there.

Which amazes more, you may wonder:

the quarter’s serrated murmur

against the thumb 

or the dove’s knuckled silence?

I do not remember where or why I acquired this volume of poetry.  Hirshfield is a poet I had heard of, but not read and perhaps I found it for sale in a bookstore or simply liked the cover – which contains a still life of peaches.  At any rate, I had it on my shelf and in lock-down mode I thought it was a good time to try it.

The title is well chosen – the book focuses on beauty, of course, but that article, “The,” identifies and expands on the noun quality of the word.  Beauty is a kind of mythical space Hirshfield opens up where the boundaries of the self and those of the world overlap.  There are smells and sounds and sensations that permeate the reader and we are called to remember or produce feelings to populate this sensory landscape.  In the opening poem, “Fado,” quoted above, the simple act of a magic show is expanded and the reader is carried across the world to Portugal where a woman in a wheelchair sings a fado.  Music and magic are transposed and we need to pay attention to such transformations.

The poems are short and clear, but often contain stunning moments.  In “My Skeleton,” the poet is celebrating that frame when suddenly its deathly imagery comes up:

When I danced,

you danced.

When you broke, 

I.

The poem is no longer strictly about the self, there is another skeleton, returned from some past whose bones are more specific – arthritic wrists and cracked ribs – and weaker is celebrated and missed.

In “Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in” the poet becomes the path and other things – birds and apples, music and ideas – have travelled her and left their mark.  It is a stirring and slightly creepy way to think of life’s course and aging, what she refers to (in “A Person Protests to Fate”) as “the long middle” -  that period between the difficulties of youth and those of old age when

“the things you (fate) have caused

me most to want

are those that furthest elude me.”

However, it would be wrong to say that this sort of existential wear and tear is dark.  That poem ends with a reference to “the penmanship love practices inside the body,” and the references to loss, which come back in the end of the book are overwhelmed by the power of having something to lose.  In the final poem, “Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain,”  Hirshfield says “I wanted my fate to be human,” and in The Beauty she has embraced both sides of that statement – the limitations of humanity are intrinsically tied to its joys

“The logic of shoes become at last simple,

…

The questions keep being new ones.”