One of the most influential poets writing today, Jane Hirshfield`s work continues to inspire me. I like the seeming simplicity of her work, how compact her poems are but how they all stand up to multiple readings.
Her poems almost always start with a very tangible object:
Green-Sriped Melons
They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.
Some people
are like this as well -
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.
An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.
What interests me about a poem like this is how straightforward it is on the surface (what could be simpler about melons in a field) but how she actually captures a rather complex series of ideas: that people are both as simple and natural and straightforward as melons growing under the sun, but also as hard to get at as a painting hidden under another painting.
In this way, the poem itself is a metaphor for humanity, it`s simple and hard to work out at the same time.
Her work almost always starts with an object: a window, a bowl of soup, a woodpecker on a ledge, but then she moves through this object, expands it, looks at it as both a rhetorical door and a symbol for what is good and bad about all of us. But though these ideas are all captured in her poems, her work is never pretentious or pedantic.
Also a translator and essayist (her 1998 book, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry contains some excellent essays about why poetry still matters), Jane Hirshfield will be at the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival next week.
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