Humility brings us to hope, slowly, and often, joyfully.įor Hirshfield, every poem is a renewal of a lifelong intention to cultivate awareness. Humility unlocks the gates of perception-“We cannot let our ideas blind us to our unknowing.” It’s a stirring call to action’s antecedent-awareness. Its subject is grim, but it is not a grim book. The book is a ledger of loss and loss-to-come. There’s a mournful quality to the work, a quiet and elegiac composure. But the poet holds no megaphone or manifesto. The collection bears witness to Earth under duress-trees toppling, birds vanishing, oceans acidifying.

Hirshfield draws on her Buddhist practice and honed poetic craft to look unflinchingly at the mess we are in, but also to find refuge. Walking among coast oak and madrone, “musters” of mushrooms (Hirshfield’s name for the larger drifts), and animal life both glimpsed and unglimpsed is also an appropriate venue for talking about Hirshfield’s latest collection, which directly engages the urgent issues of our time, especially the interwoven crises of environmental degradation, climate change, and species extinction. She’s a Dharma sister-we practice in the same Soto Zen Buddhist lineage-and it’s her poetry I turn to when I crave a clear, steadying voice, and a firm reminder of the immensity and promise of one human life within the vast mystery of the world that holds it. I’ve known Hirshfield since the mid-2000s. She has a warm, spirited, good-humored presence, and is equally eager to talk about poems, her longtime trail horse Flame, the death of an old friend, and the necessity of wonder. She keeps a steady pace, drifting slightly off the trail once to forage for chanterelles under an oak canopy. (Another Deer Park, in India, is where the historical Buddha offered his first teachings after realizing the causes of suffering.) “It’s a good place for two Buddhists to walk, don’t you think?” she says.

Deer Park in Marin County, California, is a popular urban refuge. Mountain bikers and trail runners dodge us, and other hikers pass, some with dogs. It’s not wilderness where we walk, on the first Friday afternoon of 2020. Already we’re deep in conversation about how Hirshfield produces the wise and tender poems that fill her nine poetry collections, including the newly-published Ledger. We’ve just left the trailhead for a hike on what she calls the “hem” of Mount Tamalpais. “ IT’S SUCH A SLOW JOY,” says poet Jane Hirshfield, about the work of revising a poem.

Mount and blade poems