Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems

Jane Hirshfield's "Given Sugar, Given Salt" is a unique collection of extra ordinary observation and insight expressed with elegant simplicity.

Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins, 2001) It's absurd to start talking about the best books I read in 2008 two days into the year (yes, I'm writing this review on January second), but that's the only way I can really approach Given Sugar, Given Salt, Jane Hirshfield's incredible little book of poems. When I'm reviewing a poetry book, I'll usually jot down notes, then spend fifteen to twenty minutes coming up with a quote that's both good (or awful, depending on the review) and that shows in some way the overall quality of the book; there is, however, the rare exception where I can simply open the book to a random page and start copying, fully confident that whatever passage I choose, it will be both wonderful and indicative. This is one of those books; I'm opening to a random page. "There are times I feel myself a cow stripped of her leather. The hide going on without me, flensed, vat-dipped, beaten to pliable smoothness. What remains-- awkward, vaguely aware that something is missing, but what?-- continues its looking outward, evenly breathes. Sunlight, wind, the black, inquiring noises of others: sharp now as the knife. Muscled unjacketed egg. Impossible butcher's diagram walking, Beginning to graze. ("Leather") The first sentence sets you up for a letdown: it's a sentence that screams "I am a message poem. Take me seriously." And yet, when we jump over the strophe break and hit those next two lines, we get nothing of the sort. There's a surprising image couched in erudite language that is entirely inappropriate for its subject matter, and that inappropriateness makes the surprise all the more fun. The poem continues on with its gentle, if deeply sick, humor, until we get back to the "I am a message poem" stuff right before the last strophe, and then, once again, Hirshfield turns away from it, leaving the reader to figure out what the hell "muscled, unjacketed egg" has to do with anything, and making us laugh, uncomfortably, once again with "Impossible butcher's diagram walking." That's great stuff, right there. The book's sole problem rises from this willingness Hirshfield displays time and again to walk that line between the vapid self-importance of message poetry and the brilliant, subtle lands she usually inhabits; as is to be expected, I guess, every once in a while she crosses over that line into the land of vapid message poetry. Those incursions, however, are rare, far more so than one would expect given how close Hirshfield always is to that edge. This is amazing work, and it deserves to be read. Pick it up at your earliest opportunity. **** ½

Jane Hirshfield's poems are luminous and never fail to lift me from the damp of a meaningless day. She shines light on the most ordinary things -- a room, a button -- and gives them the sheen of the holy. I always use her books in poetry appreciation workshops, and can't wait for her next collection.

I discovered Jane Hirshfield recently through a Pam Houston essay, "Redefining Success," in which the two discuss the meaning of success while walking along Muir Beach. The 69 poems in this new collection are short and simple on the surface, but deep with meaning. "Pyrocanthus berries redden in rain" (p. 6). "A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question./ Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs" (p. 9). "Each pebble in this world keeps/ its own counsel" (p. 14). A button "is its own story, completed" (p. 20). "Soup grows cold in the question" (p. 24). "A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle" (p. 55). Rocks "do not question silence,/ however long" (p. 64). Dogs sleep, "old ones especially" (p. 78). Hirshfield's poetry suggests that she is more fully present in the experience of living than the rest of us. Her observations are amazing.As a poet, Hirshfield finds meaning in the mundane and habitual. "There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing" she writes in "The Envoy" (p. 3). In "Rebus," she writes: "As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,/ we become our choices" (p. 12). "As for the boulder,/ its meditations are slow but complete," she observes in "Rock" (p. 64).Hirshfield's thin, brown book contains 69 reasons to read poetry. Whether she's walking on Muir beach with Pam Houston, or writing the poetry collected here, Hirshfield knows success.G. Merritt