The Beauty

As Hirshfield says in "A Cottony Fate," which contemplates the possibility of options, "Now I too am sixty./ There was no other life," and throughout this new collection (after Come, Thief) there's a sureness that leads her to title another poem "I Cast My Hook, I Decide To Make Peace." Hirshfield's poems always have a sense of immediacy, observing the world closely ("Rain fell as a glass/ breaks"), and here she carefully observes herself; the book opens with a series of fine poems addressing her skeleton ("each year/ imperceptibly smaller"), her proteins ("A body it seems is a highway"), her memory ("almost weightless/ this morning inside me"), and more. She's serenely aware of human limitations ("Dogs pity our noses") and equally aware that our grand sense of achievement is so much dust ("Without philosophy/ tragedy/ history,// a gray squirrel/ looks/ very busy"). As she usefully points out, it's helpful to understand that "The well runs out of thirst,/ the way time runs out a week,/ the way a country runs out of its alphabet/ or a tree runs out of its height."