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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Jane Hirshfield

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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Earth
Swallows
Everything
Gardening
Always
Metaphor
Task
Tasks
Essentials
Using
Garden

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
Jane Hirshfield
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
Jane Hirshfield
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
Jane Hirshfield
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The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be Yes. The next words: And then.
Jane Hirshfield
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
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Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.
Jane Hirshfield
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
Jane Hirshfield
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
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In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
Jane Hirshfield
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Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
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Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Jane Hirshfield