Reviews for Lives of the Heart: Poems

The average rating for Lives of the Heart: Poems based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-23 00:00:00 Liz Abbott Jane Hirshfield is coming to my village in a couple weeks so I thought I would read some of her work, on the suggestion of my friend and poet Jenn. This is my first experience of her work, and I thought it was bold to take on this subject (of love) and try to make something new of it. I very much liked the poems; she brings a Buddhist sensibility to language and image. She reads and reflects the reading in her poems of Chinese poetry. The Heart's Counting Knows Only One In Sung China, two monks friends for sixty years watched the geese pass. Where are they going? one tested the other, who couldn't say. That moment's silence continues. No one will study their friendship in the koan-books of insight. No one will remember their names. I think of them sometimes, standing, perplexed by sadness, goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes. Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains, but not yet. As the barely audible geese are not yet swallowed; as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost. Or this one: Changing Everything I was walking again in the woods, a yellow light was sifting all I saw. Willfully, with a cold heart, I took a stick, lifted it to the opposite side of the path. There, I said to myself, that's done now. Brushing one hand against the other, to clean them of the tiny fragments of bark. Her rendition of the varieties of love in this volume is not the reflection of a young person but of one with experience of heartache and complexity as much as passion. Here's some other lines/images I liked: "How silently the heart pivots on its hinge." "To sit there among the petals, altering nothing." "The rains come, the deer slip back into the mountains like hungry, rose-colored smoke." Of a mare she sees: "The way the left ear swivels into dream." This is the poetry of small observations, of subtle gestures, and "do not-doing," as Lao Tsu urged us. "More and more wanting to learn how to leave things be." I can't wait to hear her read and meet her!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-20 00:00:00 Dawn Morton Mule Heart On the days when the rest have failed you, let this much be yours - flies, dust, an unnameable odor, the waiting baskets: one for the lemons and passion, the other for all you have lost. Both empty, it will come to your shoulder, breathe slowly against your bare arm. If you offer it hay, it will eat. Offered nothing, it will stand as long as you ask. The little bells of the bridle will hang beside you quietly, in the heat and the tree's think shade. Do not let its sparse mane deceive you, or the way the left ear swivels into dream. This too is a gift of the gods, calm and complete.