The October Palace (1994)

In here collection, The October Palace, Jane Hirshfield weaves active, beautiful imagery like breath - expanding outward in the chest, expelled into the wide world, and the pulled back in again. The poem titled "Leaving the October Palace" speaks of returning. That the leaving part of a journey is never really talked about, the return is the only focus:

In Ancient Japan, to travel
meant always away --
toward the capital, one spoke only of return.
And these falling needles and leaves speak of return,
their long labors of green tired finally into gold,
the desire that remembered them into place
prepared at last to let go.
Though not for want of faithfulness --
all that once followed the sun still follows it now,
as it turns away.
The courtiers assemble their carriages, fold up their robes.
By daybreak, the soundless mountains bow under snow.

This expansion of ripples outward toward the edges followed by a returning to the center was the first thing I noted in her poems. Instead of condensing one image to its minutest part, Hirshfield breaks the analogy wide open. While doing so, she chooses repetitive diction, altering the words like a camera lens capturing every angle or like Henry James' "many windows" perspectives in his stories. This was, at first, difficult for me to swall because I don't like to repeat many words within a poem and rarely use a refrain. Hirshfield's diction, though, was not a refrain. In reading the poems out loud, I found that it not only served as a method to imbue the poem with rhythm, but the alliteration and repitition first evoked the image and then pressed it into my sight as if forcing me to see it before moving on.

I looked forward to many rambles through words with Jane.