Yes, go to Jane Hirshfield for pleasure and enlightenment in her poems, but make room, too, for her luminous prose.

Consider just some of the chapter headings: “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes” or “Uncarryable Remainders: Poetry and Uncertainty” or “Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise” for example. Hirshfield illuminates as she unpacks the poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins, Basho, Edgar Allen Poe, W.H. Auden, Phllip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Frost, and more. She is especially thoughtful about the connections between meditation and the making and encountering of poetry, the connections of our inner and outer worlds. The volume as photographic images, too, tucked here and there, like postcards that comment on the text. Of course, I love this! If I had one wish, it would be for Hirshfield to have included more work by poets who walk or used to walk in women’s bodies. Still, I am very grateful to Hirshfield for her original thought and work, and perhaps I will be able to apply some of her observations to other work that speaks to me in order that it speak to me more completely.

Background for My Poem for April 7, “Bands of Brass”:

I had a great deal of that stuck feeling this morning. Then I glanced down at the cover of at this very book that I am slowly reading with a great deal of pleasure, Jane Hirshfield‘s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2017) and a slice of imagery sparked this (not great but not completely nothing) poem.

I had an enjoyable time double-checking my understanding of armillary spheres, and was taken with a video from the History of Science Museum at Oxford University.

Happy reading! Happy Writing! LESLIE

P.S. If you are not receiving the poem for each day in April via email but would like to, let me know, and I will add you to the list.