The Beauty

Starred review from January 19, 2015
Hirshfield (Come, Thief) opens her beautiful eighth book of poems describing the copper bowls of a scale in perfect balance: on one end of the scales a woman in a wheelchair sings a traditional Portuguese fado, on the other end everyone else present hangs in attention. This moment, one that expresses the internal vastness of the individual, bleeds into the rest of the collection as Hirshfield seeks the idea of balance. In a collection where “an hour can be dropped like a glass,” the pieces are seen by the reader as a new whole. “The ideas of poets turn into only themselves,” she notes, and those ideas are both the most important and the least. She uses the quotidian to peer into the life cycle. When she writes, “Now I too am sixty./ There was no other life,” it is as if the whole world had reached that milestone before her and she is somehow the last to see it through. The book pleads with itself to remember the past; the moments where days drifted by and doors could open or close. It pleads not to be forgotten. If Hirshfield’s previous work could be accused of lacking duende, this one surely cannot; it is a book of late-midlife koans that finally only want one thing, for “fate to be human.”

March 15, 2015

As Hirshfield says in "A Cottony Fate," which contemplates the possibility of options, "Now I too am sixty./ There was no other life," and throughout this new collection (after Come, Thief) there's a sureness that leads her to title another poem "I Cast My Hook, I Decide To Make Peace." Hirshfield's poems always have a sense of immediacy, observing the world closely ("Rain fell as a glass/ breaks"), and here she carefully observes herself; the book opens with a series of fine poems addressing her skeleton ("each year/ imperceptibly smaller"), her proteins ("A body it seems is a highway"), her memory ("almost weightless/ this morning inside me"), and more. She's serenely aware of human limitations ("Dogs pity our noses") and equally aware that our grand sense of achievement is so much dust ("Without philosophy/ tragedy/ history,// a gray squirrel/ looks/ very busy"). As she usefully points out, it's helpful to understand that "The well runs out of thirst,/ the way time runs out a week,/ the way a country runs out of its alphabet/ or a tree runs out of its height." VERDICT These open, approachable poems offer insights that ring true for anyone who's lived a little; they will appeal to a wide range of readers.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
Throughout The Beauty, her gracefully evocative eighth book of poems, Hirshfield is archly witty and riddling. In My Skeleton, for example, she offers a fresh and startling look at our relationship with our bodies, a subject rooted in her fascination with perception, science, and underlying structures of all kinds. Her succinct and arresting observationsoften framed within such everyday moments as waking in the morning and sitting in a kitchen, and inspired by the subtle wonders of honey, cellophane, church bells, even the journey of a common coldswerve suddenly and exhilaratingly onto metaphysical terrain. Her pithy and disarming lyrics have a touch of Dickinson about them as she sets human dilemmas within nature's perpetual surge: Generation. / Strange word: both making and passing. Hirshfield's contemplative acuity, erudite imagination, and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a beautifully agile and sage volume.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)