Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
cat doors long
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
cat missing mercy
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
being-yourself fate punishment
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
artist years umbria
Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.
oil soul solitude
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
grief self tree
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
dark joy balance
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
looks fields common
Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
bottles perfume release
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,
death fine mesh
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
summer autumn apples
The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
garden tasks earth
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
heart writing ideas
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.
cutting trying needs
At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.