Sunday Snippets: Time

March felt six years long and April felt like six minutes. And I constantly forget what day it is. Time is weird.

GOV. NEWSOM ANNOUNCES PLAN FOR RESTAURANTS TO DELIVER 3 MEALS DAILY TO SENIORS AT NO CHARGE

Why is no one talking about how unsustainable this is for working parents?

Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor.

Covid-19 is ravaging one of the country’s wealthiest black counties

New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet

An English Home With a Beautiful Blue Kitchen

A poem about finding life while we shelter in place

If you're hitting a wall, you're not alone

Our Loss of the Trivial Is No Small Thing

Book Review: The Beauty

"We live our lives in one place and look in every moment into another."

Jane Hirshfield's latest collection, The Beauty, highlights these moments, moments in between moments. Hirshfield is known for her sparse, simple lines and they are highlighted beautifully in this collection.

Each poem takes on a small object or moment in time. From Perspective: An Assay, the line "Likes everything just as it is, then just as it is, then just as it is." counts off seconds like a ticking clock. There was another second past and another and another.

There are such simple stanzas, but the lines force the reader to linger and digest more than what lies on the page. Some other lines included:

"Generation./Strange word: both making and passing"

"How rarely I have stopped to thank/the steady effort of the world to stay the world."

"What caused the fire, we ask, meaning, lightning, wiring, matches./How precisely and unbidden/oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

This delightful poet offers us the chance, in this crazed world where the phrases simplify your life and doing it all coexist, to take a literal step back, curl up in a warm chair and see the every day moments that are missed.

A wonderful new collection from an accomplished poet which deserves a home on any bookshelf.


(Photo Credit-Amazon)

Book Review: Come, Thief

Jane Hirshfield's latest, Come, Thief, comes at the beginning of fall, at least that's what it felt like to me. There was a certain lushness in the poems, reminiscent of warm sweaters and hands laced around coffee mugs.

The poems also have an older feeling to them, like a beloved clock winding itself down after many useful years, especially in the poem "A Hand is Shaped for What it Holds or Makes." The narrator says "A life is shaped by what it holds or makes. I make these words for what they can't replace." Awe inspiring lines.

I have to say that my favorite poem in the book is "Sweater." It's a writer's poem and one that I gasped aloud when I read it.

From "Sweater"

"Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,
day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool."

I didn't enjoy Hirshfield's earlier works as much as this collection. She seems to have settled, in a good way, into her writing and I'm now eagerly anticipating her next book.