Each Happiness Ringed by Lions : Selected Poems

by Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensible to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield's structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

Genres: Poetry

247 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past, and one e-book on Basho and the development of haiku, The Heart of Haiku. Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th Annual Distinguished Achievement Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been featured in ten editions of The Best American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement/TLS, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Hirshfield’s poems have also been featured many times on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac as well as two Bill Moyers’ PBS television specials. She has presented her poems and taught at festivals and universities throughout the U.S., in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland, and Ireland. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Hirshfield's appearance schedule can be found at:

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry

‘I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry,’ poet Jane Hirshfield once declared, ‘it is based on a thoroughly lived life.’ Her works are a perfect reflection of this belief and speak to the many aspects of a life lived with our inner struggles, our place in the natural world, and more abstract observations on the complexities of language and thought. With life, there is always death and few poets better embrace our own temporality than Hirshfield, tapping into Zen teachings in works that perfectly balance Eastern and Western vibes. Each Happiness Ringed by Lions is a perfect introduction to this phenomenal poet, offering a selection of her works up through Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) and capturing some of her most poignant moments. There is a succinct clarity to her works but closer inspection will find a galaxy full of complex ethical and emotional insight within each poem that is sure to bloom in the hearts of their readers. It is her embrace of dark with light and how kindness, above all, reigns supreme that has kept me returning to her poetry again and again in good times and especially in bad to feel the warmth of life emanating from her words.

'So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.'

After completing her degree at Princeton and publishing her first poem which went on to win awards, Hirshfield spent 8 years of study at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her studies have a profound effect on her poetry as she taps into beauty and sorrow with the same elegant grace. Czesław Miłosz once praised her that ‘her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness,’ which is a perfect summation. The seemingly simplicity of her work slips a deeper understanding of life quickly into your mind and challenges you with the mysteries of life in a way that is unbelievably inviting. As she writes in her poem The Supple Deer, ‘to be that porous, to have such largeness pass / through me, is a feeling we as the reader experience engaging with her work. Though simplicity is the wrong way to look at it. In an interview she said:

Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world…I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body.

Clarity, it would seem, is the goal, which she very much achieves. When reading a Hirshfield collection, you always look at the world differently after returning from her pages.

‘Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
Each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.’

One of my favorites is the poem The Standing Deer from the collection The Lives of the Heart (1997), which also serves as a great look at some of her best themes. Here it is in full:

As the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is
too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Beloved, what can be, what was,
will be taken from us.
I have disappointed.
I am sorry. I knew no better.

A root seeks water.
Tenderness only breaks open the earth.
This morning, out the window,
the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

Hirshfield often plays with ying-and-yang dualities, or contrasting yet complimentary ideas such as the house growing either cluttered or sparse, being both empty and filled, or, as in ’Nothing Lasts’: ‘Grief and hope / the skipping rope’s two ends’, these two ideas having their interplay at the heart of her work. In these dualities we are reminded that much of life is what we make of it, or as she says in One will feel this as a blessing, another as horror’. There is the grief that she--we all--disappoint others, and the inevitability that everything will be taken from us. But, as common with Hirshfield, this doesn’t lead to despair but rather an acceptance of temporality that is beautifully embedded in the image of a deer seen out the window. There and then gone. Life is fleeting, and that fleetingness is beautiful.

Five-legged Chair
Hunger, fear, curiosity, desire –
these four
would have more than sufficed.

But what sudden lurch
of kindness
or small moment’s inattention
were creation’s fierce gods possessed,

to give us this supernumerary joy?

These five pillars mentioned in the above poem are also, more or less. the five pillars of her poetry and from each her prose pirouettes across the page to interpret life. Kindness stands strongest above them all, and through Hirshfield we see how kindness is what makes all aspects of life bearable, how even grief is worth passing through when there is kindness to rise like the sun after a night of rain. This is what has kept me returning to her poetry again and again in good times and especially in bad to feel the warmth of life emanating from her words.

Autumn
Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens--
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

Hirshfield is a gift to poetry and easily one of my absolute favorites. She is definitely one of the first I turn to when needing words to help process an emotion, and one that I find the most comforting when death is on the horizon. This is a wonderful collection for those first getting introduced to her work, and the best part is that many of her great poems were still to come and once you’ve devoured this book more await. Jane Hirshfield will tear your heart into tiny pieces and put it back together in a loving way that will make it better than before.

5/5

Ripeness
Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.

[Bettie]

So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the strongest Selected Poems I've read. Chock full of gems.

[Johanna Lückel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best poetry collection I‘ve ever read. Deep but not intellectual snobbery shit. Accessible for understanding but not school task poetry either.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."
- "The Envoy"

"Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left at the table."
- "Rebus"

"Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world."
- "Poem with Two Endings"

"A scale weighs the outer world in pounds and ounces.
The sum does not alter, whatever happens within and between us.

One will feel this as blessing, another as horror."
- "A Scale Weighs the Outer World in Pounds and Ounces"

"The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
what dissolves will dissolve -
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings."
- "Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand"

"How silently the heart pivots on its hinge."
- "Not Moving Even One Step"

"I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry."
- "Hope and Love"

"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it."
- "The Weighing"

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.” — “In Praise of Coldness”

[Conal Frost · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit hit and miss for me but I would still recommend this collection. There’s some really beautiful stuff in here.

[Degan Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful book of poems. they didn’t grab me (either individually or as a collection) but I enjoyed reading them.

[Michael]

I have to admit, I like "selected poems" collections. It's nice to have a whole range of poems from a poet's whole career.

Evidently, in England, some of our poets have "selected poems" books that aren't available in U.S. editions.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the little bio of Hirshfield that comes at the beginning of this book, it describes her as having lived "for the past twenty years in a small white cottage overlooking fruit trees, old roses and Mt. Tamalpais." This is probably how we should all be living. If only we could write these poems.