{"id":11939,"date":"2021-04-17T12:02:47","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T11:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11939"},"modified":"2021-04-29T11:48:15","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T10:48:15","slug":"jane-hirschfield-ledger-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11939","title":{"rendered":"Jane Hirshfield | Ledger<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Hirshfield |\u00a0Ledger<\/em>\u00a0| Bloodaxe: \u00a310.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"9781556595615-FC-700px-wide-resize-400x601\"<\/p>\n

There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield\u2019s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic.\u00a0 Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality.<\/p>\n

Ledger<\/em> is Hirshfield\u2019s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a kind of manifesto, \u2018Let Them not Say\u2019. Up to a point, the poem comments in a way that you might predict from that title, \u2018Let them not say: we did not see it. \/ We saw. \/\/ Let them not say: we did not hear it. \/ We heard.\u2019\u00a0 However, the poem ends with, \u2018Let them say, as they must say something: \/\/ A kerosene beauty. \/ It burned. \/\/ Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light, praised, \/ and it burned.\u2019 Hirshfield is very good at this slight and always interesting turning of the prism.\u00a0 Thus, the poem exists as a manifesto, that is clear and beautifully executed. But the poem also exists as a poem in its own right.\u00a0 The start of the poem and that ending suggests that we are all complicit, but that complicity is explored to offer both a greater depth and insight and with that depth and insight, a greater poetic resonance.<\/p>\n

The book as a whole is, as its title indicates, a ledger in which humanity’s\u00a0deeds are witnessed and held up;\u00a0 held up, not simply as evidence against, although that is certainly the case.\u00a0 But humanity as a whole is seen in a cleareyed light, that refracts around us all.\u00a0 There are, of course, dangers in that desire to include \u2018us\u2019 with the writer\u2019s own views.\u00a0 These dangers are that making us all complicit does actually become finger-pointing by any other name.\u00a0 It says that \u2018I\u2019 recognize these dangers and you do not.\u00a0 It is me who is holding up the mirror and who shifts the emotional burden on to you, the reader.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, Hirshfield recognises that danger in the next poem in the book, \u2018The Bowl\u2019. This poem starts, \u2018If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten. \/ If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.\u2019 The middle of the poem, however, comments, \u2018A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl. \/ Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness, \/ It eats them. \/\/ Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry. \/\/ The bowl cannot be thrown away. \/ It cannot be broken. \/\/ It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless, \/ and, big though it seems, fits exactly into two human hands.\u2019\u00a0 There is something Frost-like about this kind of writing.\u00a0 Its simplicity flirts with a kind of banality. But the simplicity is a directness that seeks to embody the experience; not simply with that final clause.\u00a0 In part, the repetition of \u2018bowl\u2019 and the repeated \u2018it\u2019 standing for the bowl allow the thing itself to vanish behind its attributes. And the other listings, from \u2018wars\u2019 to \u2018kindness\u2019, and the parallelisms of \u2018cannot be\u2019 create rhythms which pull the reader in.\u00a0 The rhythms allow the reader to move seamlessly between the abstractions of \u2018wars\u2019 and \u2018loves\u2019 say, to that almost abrupt \u2018trucks\u2019; through to the surreal juxtaposition of \u2018calm, uneclipsable, rindless\u2019.\u00a0 Hirshfield has an extraordinary talent for both opening a poem out and yet pinning down; allowing the imagination both to reach out and to settle.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, there are larger, more narrative poems, though \u2018narrative\u2019 is again, not quite the right word.\u00a0 In \u2018In Ulvik\u2019, Hirshfield expands upon the life of one Olaf Hauge, described in the poem\u2019s epigraph as, \u2018He spent his whole life in Ulvik, working as a gardener in his own orchard.\u2019 Hirshfield explores this as a kind of doubleness as both a protagonist like Olaf Hauge, but also as an observer;\u00a0 the gardener and the employer of the gardener,<\/p>\n

I would give myself the day off
\nand thank myself for my kindness
\nand answer myself, It\u2019s nothing, nothing, go on now,
\nput your feet up, find somewhere warm.
\nAnd then I would go back into my house
\nand think of my kindness
\nand wonder if my gardener was warm now also also.<\/p>\n

After some speculation on the apples \u2018fattening on their own trees without us,\u2019 the poem ends,<\/p>\n

and one of us, first, then the other,
\nmight start to wonder a little,
\nwhile pushing a cut of cured applewood into the fire,
\nabout loneliness and separateness and what
\nit is lives outside one person\u2019s skin and inside another\u2019s.<\/p>\n

It is Frost who comes to mind here, too, but there is something Chekhovian in the introspection;\u00a0 the almost neurotic sense of another\u2019s life led so close to one\u2019s own that their life and one\u2019s own are interchangeable, backed up with that personification of the apples\u2019 fattening in their own, separate lives.<\/p>\n

As we have seen with \u2018The Bowl\u2019, Hirshfield has an extraordinary ability to inhabit other things and other people.\u00a0 But the poems are not only about that inhabiting.\u00a0 Hirshfield\u2019s \u2018activism\u2019, if we can call it that, is an attempt to explore what happens when we do<\/u> inhabit the existences of the Other.\u00a0 If we witness, Hirshfield tells us, we need to know what that means, what that witness means in terms of how we might change not only our perceptions and also our behaviours.\u00a0 That witness means a kind of absorbing, a taking in and then working back into the person or thing that we absorb from. This is a kind of phenomenological change, as pretentious as that sounds.\u00a0 Hirshfield challenges the reader to perceive more completely.\u00a0 And, yes, a lot of poetry, perhaps most of it tries to do this.\u00a0 Hirshfield wants us to examine our perceptions so closely that we can see the truth in them, and accept them.\u00a0 This acceptance is not, in turn, a passivity, it is a chance to become more fully ourselves in alignment with others.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Hirshfield |\u00a0Ledger\u00a0| Bloodaxe: \u00a310.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield\u2019s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic.\u00a0 Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield\u2019s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nJane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11939\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jane Hirshfield |\u00a0Ledger\u00a0| Bloodaxe: \u00a310.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield\u2019s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic.\u00a0 Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. 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