(November 1994)

Hirshfield’s another new-to-me poet - I stumbled across this little gem while randomly surfing poetry sites and was instantly captivated. There is a wonderful balance between the static and the dynamic - the explicit description of painting leads me almost subconsciously to visualise the poem itself as a painting, beautiful and self-contained, and then a metaphorical step backwards reveals a temporal, almost balletic aspect that paradoxically enhances rather than shattering the impression of containedness.

I was reminded strongly of Basho’s famous haiku

  old pond.....
  a frog leaps in
  water's sound

(Poem #23, and see also Poem #1455 and
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm) - there is the same impression of a sequence of events captured within a bounded whole, though Hirshfield’s penultimate “Takes pity” adds a human element that takes it beyond the isolated beauty of the haiku.

— Martin

Links

Biography: American Poet, 1953-
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/563

http://www.sunyulster.edu/people/Hirshfield.asp

Interesting articles:

http://www.poems.com/hirinter.htm

http://www.salon.com/weekly/hirshfield.html