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Volume 5, Number 2 - Spring 2007
On the
Bookshelf
by
Patricia Andres
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Often, in People & Stories/ Gente y Cuentos, we introduce a poem that may extend and deepen the positions put forth during the discussion. But even when we’re not adding poems to a session, we’re always examining the poetics of the story, the language that reaches beyond words through imagery, symbolism and sound.
Hirshfield’s Nine Gates offers powerful reminders of why poetry is essential to our mission, to “discover ways to see things differently” through literature. Through numerous examples, she creates meditative reflections on the poetic as a mode of consciousness, a way of seeing and being in the world. The poem emerges from the “mind of concentration,” it is a particular way of “organizing thought through sound,” it will “know more than can be said in any other way” and it will “approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.” Ultimately Hirshfield embraces poetry as born of a consciousness of connectedness that speaks with empathic attention, inviting us to see the world afresh.