"is the author of six books of poetry, several translations and two collections of essays. Her most recent volume After, on being published in both the US and UK, was nominated for the UK's T. S. Eliot Award and named one of the Washington Post's best books of 2006. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts; other awards include the Poetry Center Book Award, Columbia University's Translation Center Award and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal.
Her work gravitates toward the point where the philosophical, emotional, and sensual realms intersect...." See HERE.
I like to read poetry, I do not like, as much, to read about poetry. I think a poem (or a poet) can be done to death by over analysing it and over-interviewing her/him. There are numerous interviews and articles about this poet online. I'll leave it to any interested reader to Google for 'em. I tried to glean enough for a post from one or two, but soon found them a tad irritating. Sorry. I'm sure Ms Hirshfield, and all of her interviewers, would find my views equally irritating!
There could be some astro-irritability here for me - though I'm not sure from whence it could come. Her natal Sun is less than a degree from my natal Jupiter in Pisces. There are other conjunctions too her Aries Mars conjoins my Saturn (maybe this!) Her Venus is close to my Aries Moon, Her Moon and Uranus in Cancer are close to my ascendant. She doesn't have much Earth - only Jupiter in Taurus and it's close to my North Node of Moon. I think the irritation factor must be her Pisces Mercury irritating my more down-to-earth Capricorn Mercury. I'll leave it at that.
I do like this poem of Ms Hirschfield's though:
Optimism
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.
And this one:
A Person Protests to Fate
A person protests to fate:
"The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me."
Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.
To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.
During the long middle:
conjugating a rivet
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
preserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before
and the penmanships love practices inside the body.
