Given Sugar, Given Salt

by Jane Hirshfield

Overview

“Hirshfield’s are the kind of poems that could—before you even realize it—have quietly changed your life.” —O Magazine

In this luminous and authoritative collection, Jane Hirshfield presents an ever–deepening and altering comprehension of human existence in poems utterly unique, as William Matthews once wrote of her work, in their "praise of ceaseless mutability as life's central splendor."

Hirshfield explores questions of identity, aging, death, and of time and the variegated gifts brought by its relentless passage. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060959012
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/02/2002
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

The author of five previous poetry collections and a book of essays, Jane Hirshfield has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and she is the winner of the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Read an Excerpt

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something — terror? happiness? grief? —
entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Editorial Reviews

"Jane Hirshfield's poems move like light beams — searching, discovering, pausing to make sure. They have some of the calligraphic plainness of classical Chinese painting: a few strokes and a new landscape appears, with a life in it not seen before but at once recognized. These are poems of space, air, and a remarkable precision of observation and revealed feeling." — W. S. Merwin

“Jane Hirshfield’s poems have such a wonderfully obsessive personal grammar and such delicate reversals that all objects and elements—like a house and its neighboring redwood tree—merge.” — Michael Ondaatje

“Hirshfield’s are the kind of poems that could—before you even realize it—have quietly changed your life.” — O Magazine

“These are assured, controlled poems that tread carefully where others have trampled.” — Library Journal

"These poems are highly accessible....[their sense] seeps into one's consciousness, like the aftertaste of some delectable morsel." — Kirkus Reviews

"I enjoyed this new collection very much. Hirshfield's poems are fresh bright, very precise clear. She is a refreshing poet." — Sue Domis, Sunshine & Wisteria

From the Publisher

Jane Hirshfield’s poems have such a wonderfully obsessive personal grammar and such delicate reversals that all objects and elements—like a house and its neighboring redwood tree—merge.

Michael Ondaatje

Hirshfield’s are the kind of poems that could—before you even realize it—have quietly changed your life.

O Magazine

Jane Hirshfield's poems move like light beams — searching, discovering, pausing to make sure. They have some of the calligraphic plainness of classical Chinese painting: a few strokes and a new landscape appears, with a life in it not seen before but at once recognized. These are poems of space, air, and a remarkable precision of observation and revealed feeling.

W. S. Merwin

I enjoyed this new collection very much. Hirshfield's poems are fresh & bright, very precise & clear. She is a refreshing poet.

Sue Domis

Hirshfield's fifth collection, and, as with her previous work the poems are simple, almost ascetic in structure and vocabulary-yet quite complex in meaning. (To borrow a phrase popular on Madison Avenue, they comprise a "high-attention product.") Yet, unlike some of her academic contemporaries, Hirshfield does not engage in intentional obfuscation. Her purpose is rather to elucidate, and she does so with almost blinding clarity and sincerity. While she mentions Tu Fu and Li Po, she does not cotton to the faux Zen koans currently in vogue whose great truths sound like dialogue paraphrased from Kung Fu reruns. She has found her own truth and fashioned her own vessel for conveying it. Her specialty is the everyday object-a button, a pair of scissors, a spoon-and "their circle of simple, passionate thusness, their hidden rituals of luck and solitude." While the philosopher may contemplate nature through detachment, Hirshfield gains her knowledge through familiarity, even intimacy, with it. The resultant verse is therefore sensual rather than austere. And because she is "not entirely embarrassed to be human," she offers poems based on a soulful resignation to life's dilemmas as opposed to a merely intellectual renunciation of them. Not to make her work too forbidding, it must be stressed that these poems are highly accessible. Their sense, however, does not come to one in an epiphanous flash. Rather, it seeps into one's consciousness, like the aftertaste of some delectable morsel.

Kirkus Reviews