More and more I have come to admire resilience.  Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.  But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.

— Jane Hirshfield, "Optimism" in Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) (via The Hammock Papers)

Jane Hirshfield Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems “Identity”

LINNAEAN PROBLEM

I have been wondering why there is no name for that part of poetry’s music which is not rhythmic. It is simple to say ‘meter’, ‘drumbeat’, ‘stress’ – but what is the other half called? Prosody, ‘sound’, melopoeia – each covers both. Rhyme is merely a fraction; assonance, consonance, tune mean only themselves. Perhaps it is like the problem of horse and rider: Easy to have a horse with no rider, impossible to have a rider without, grazing somewhere nearby, a horse. Time exists without the scented, muscular body traveling through it, but no planet, parrot tick, leopard lives free of time. Even the purest singing signals a maculate conception, within an imagination schooled by passage. And so that part of poetry’s music made by the untempered mouth, breath, and throat remains, without the measuring hoofbeat, uncapturable silence. A mockingbird’s song heard in a mirror; the shadow a dog’s night-barking leaves on the dark.

—Jane Hirshfield, from “Given Sugar, Given Salt” (1997–2001), Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “The Silence”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

Jane Hirshfield, from “Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand,” Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

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.

Jane Hirshfield, from “The Envoy,” Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

Jane Hirshfield Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems “Red Berries”

Jane Hirshfield Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

Jane Hirshfield Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems “A Cedary Fragrance”

— Jane Hirshfield from, “Salt Heart”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “White Curtain in Sunlight and Wind”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “The New Silence”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “Reading Chinese Poetry Before Dawn”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “The Gods Are Not Large”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “Mathematics”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

— Jane Hirshfield from, “Lion and Angel Dividing the Maple Between Them”, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems