The Ordinary and the Onslaught: The Many Facets of Ledger
Megan Foster explores Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poems, from their intimate quotidian details to their insistent reminders of human frailty and failure.
By Megan Foster
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et them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.” So begins Jane Hirshfield’s Ledger, a poetry collection that deftly maneuvers between political and climactic turmoil and the quiet astonishments of being alive. Even when Hirshfield writes about the seemingly mundane, be it objects found at home or whatever a person wears, she is never complacent. Throughout Ledger subsists the urgent reminders of human frailty and failings and the need to address both. Like in her poem “Vest,” where Hirshfield flits between contemplating her sister’s ashes and Auschwitz, and a foreign receipt and a forgotten kazoo rediscovered in an old vest pocket—a gentle nudge to her readers that both death and whimsy are ingrained in the everyday.
In “As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us,” Hirshfield addresses our delight in the ordinary as its own wonder but considers, too, what we owe the world—or, more to the point, what beauty we take from it: “We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder / as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast-iron pan. / Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.” Her poetry frequently refers to the injustices of humanity against humanity or humanity against the earth itself. “The news keeps coming, / with its one crooked / finger. / death death death death death,” she bemoans in “A Folding Screen,” which hints at the fading of shock to those who witness it regularly on the news. Yet the “duckling descendants” traversing “squares of the centuries’ gold-leafed painting, / as if inside the crease of a still living river” implicitly refers, too, to humanity ravaging the earth for its own selfish purposes.
If we accept our connections to the earth and its inhabitants, far flung or close at hand, their suffering ought to be counted with our everyday concerns.
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Again, because Hirshfield melds the ordinary with onslaught, she often writes of atrocity in the midst of her normal rituals, like thinking of riots, shootings, and bombings while doing push-ups. It’s a poignant reminder that onslaught, for so many, is a simple fact of everyday life; furthermore, her poetry is a gentle compelling to recognize that, if we accept our connections to the earth and its inhabitants, far flung or close at hand, their suffering ought to be counted with our everyday concerns. Hirshfield, of course, puts it best in “In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia”: “I entered the debt that is owed to the real.” Suffering, she reminds us, is very much a part of the real. Thank God she reminds us that joy, even silliness, is a part of it, too. Otherwise Hirshfield’s poem “Paint” would not exist, and we would be bereft of its treasure: her musing on the existence of paint and the fact that “pee splashes back, / wets the pants, soaks the shoes. / Surprise! the wall says.”
Among the poems in Ledger are a handful devoted to abstracts of human living: hunger, contentment, longing, dignity, wonder. “My Silence” is aptly devoted to an empty page. Hirshfield writes often of silence, in fact, and employs it well in her poetry, knowing when to delve deeper and press the bruise and when to let the abstracts or objects she’s describing speak for themselves. She writes enchanting poems addressing a number of objects, from a bucket to a ream of paper, glasses to an empty movie theatre. She catalogs aspects of nature: trees, deer, chrysanthemums, snow, oranges, mountains, ants’ nests. Nothing, it seems, is not worth writing about—or wondering about, for that matter. This happily includes anecdotes of her own life, through which Hirshfield further invites readers to delight in the everyday. Her musing over a noisy upstairs neighbor thumping about in heels reminds us that even annoyances can offer a sense of intimacy. In her poem “Advice to Myself,” she admits to rediscovering an old file with the same label—only to realize it’s empty.
Nothing, it seems, is not worth writing about—or wondering about, for that matter.
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o many of Hirshfield’s poems are microcosms of her poetry overall. They all touch on similar issues of our injustices against the earth and each other, and the beauties of the world that, despite our meddling, thrive to our benefit and delight. Yet to say that reading one of her poems would be like reading them all would be a gross injustice. Each poem in Ledger is a different gift that masterfully pushes important questions to the forefront—not out of accusation or condemnation, but out of curiosity and care for the world, its people, and Hirshfield’s own slowly aging body.
Megan Foster has been a tutor, teacher, bookseller, book buyer, and toy buyer. She currently lives in Boston with her husband and their eleven babies (i.e. plants).
Ledger: Poems is Jane Hirshfield’s ninth collection of poetry. It was published on March 10, 2020 by Penguin Random House. You can purchase a copy on the publisher’s website here.