Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world.
Jane HirshfieldYou must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
Jane HirshfieldNeither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane HirshfieldPoems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
Jane HirshfieldSam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.
Jane Hirshfield