Reflections of a Man's Heart

Last week several new poetry books arrived, all of them written or edited by Jane Hirshfield.

The first book is "The lives of the heart", poems written by J. H. While I didn't like it as much as "Of gravity & angels" (yum!), I am enjoying it.

This is one of the poems.

Not-Yet
Morning of buttered toast;
of coffeee, sweetened, with milk.

Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of checkadees, feeding them gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch -
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-.

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little close to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

This one I like a lot too ^^

Late Prayer
Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby -
all the heaven and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

And I already posted Lion and Angel Dividing the Mapple Between Them.

The second book is "Women in praise of the sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women", a selection of poems written by women during the last 4300 years. I didn't know what to expect about the book, just trusted Jane H. (the editor)...

Having just skimmed through it, I'm not sure if I would recommend it. Hmm.

Anyway, here is just one short poem:

The madness of love
The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other:
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high.

- Hadewijch of Antwerp, 13th c.

The last book is "Nine gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry", a collection of essays written by J.H. too. She writes about subjects such as originality, the problems of translation, indirection, concentration, etc.

The essay on translation, in which she talks about the problems of translating some of Izumi Shikibu's poems is illuminating -and shows how much she loves her work.

Have to confess that I have just skimmed *veeery* quickly through the book, though.

Whatever, just the poems and some of the comments about them she writes to illustrate her ideas make the book worthwile. For example:

Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn't it really *powerful* that "You must change your life"?

^^

And, here are some of Hirshfield's comments:

"To look closely with the attention of quesitoning changes everything. It is , if undertaken fully, revolutionary...

Do not think it is an accident that it is Apollo, patron god of poetry, at whose figure Rilke looks. The activity of poetry is to tell us we must change our lives. It does this by posing again and again a question that cannot be answered except with our whole being -body, speech and mind. What is the nature of this moment? poetry asks, and we have no rest until the question is answered. Then it is asked again..."

Have to confess that reading this makes me feel good ^^