The Beauty

A stunning new collection of verse, paired with the publication of Ten Windows, the author's new collection of essays, becomes a literary occasion for spring and Poetry Month.

This new collection opens with a series of "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses the familiar materials of the self to explore the profundities and quirks of existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home/ then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." She reflects on the advice someone older long ago gave her--to avoid life's "or"s--and she concludes, "Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life." This robust sense of inevitability, and the poet's tender consciousness of the unjudging "beauty" of what just exists, make the poems powerfully affecting. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is A World," as she entitles one poem, and her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") are doors through which we enter into a higher understanding of ourselves and of the small beauties we so often miss.