The asking New and selected poems

Hirshfield's mindfully measured poems, inquiries into the mysteries and fundamentals of being alive, of being human, are essential works. Pared down in structure, her lyrics are lushly observed and deeply questioning as well as nimble, imaginative, witty, and poignant. Hirshfield discerns revelations within a simple room and in encounters with other species, sunshine, starlight, and memories as she balances loss and joy. Her profound attunement to life's interconnectivity inspires her incisive dismay over our roughshod decimation of the great living web that sustains us. Hirshfield's exquisitely formed, intricate reckonings incandesce in this necessary collection of selected poems from her nine previous books of poetry, from Alaya (1982) to Ledger (2020), and an opening set of 33 powerful new poems. As with all her work, these lyrics sync our consciousness to the rhythm of breath and the music of words ringing with freshly mined implications, as in "Manifest," a stunning vision of spinning, sun-circling Earth. Hirshfield calls our attention to life's continual exchange from dark to light, silence to sound, unknowing to realization, sunlight to fruit, grain to bread, love to touch, death to more love. She calls out our inability "To recognize fully the Amazon burning, / the Arctic burning," then tells us: "don't despair of this falling world, not yet didn't it give you the asking".

Spanning from 1971 to 2023, this outstanding chronological selection begins with new, uncollected work and ends with a portion from "Ledger," published in 2020. A longtime practitioner of California Zen Buddhism who approaches poetry with the discipline of daily prayer, Hirshfield directs her poems at the natural world while examining problems of the self: "To be personal is easy:.../ I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal." Poems about love are present throughout the author's oeuvre. Still, Hirshfield wrestles with contradiction and despair; the lines "everything is still possible" and "everything now is finished" appear in the same poem. She is particularly skilled at writing short verses hinged on surprise; "Two Kerosene Lanterns," for instance, wittily casts a mishap from a cat's point of view. Doors and windows are frequent metaphors, as in "Three Times My Life Has Opened": "There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light/ stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,/ or the one red leaf the snow releases in March." Longer poems take on difficult topics, including today's political and environmental crises. These muscular yet lyrical poems offer necessary reminders of joy in a world marked by suffering. (Sept.)