Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
truth fishes humans
If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
passion justice failing
Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.
voice heartless trying
You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
real mean simple
The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
needed
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
order firsts gains
In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything
thinking imagination mind
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
self world growing
In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
community singing literature
Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.
hands weight unyielding
Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.
grief joy poetry
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
horse hammers trainers
I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.
dream night house
In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
horse phones air
Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.