Helping things come into their own

Jane Hirshfield's yard seems the perfect metaphor for her poetry. In front of her white bungalow in Mill Valley, Calif., lies a garden with vegetables, perennials, old roses, and a dozen fruit trees. Behind her house stand second-growth redwoods, tall and spindly. That juxtaposition - what she has cultivated for years and the potential for great growth - seems especially telling as she looks toward the second half of her career.

The first half, of course, has blossomed beautifully. Hirshfield has published five books of poems, a collection of essays, and a book of translations. Her awards include a Guggenheim and a $25,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets she received last November for distinguished poetic achievement. The latter places her in the company of America's most celebrated writers.

But as gratifying as that recognition is - an "absolute shock" she says - Hirshfield remains focused on her writing. It, like her garden, is an evocative mix of control and wildness, stunning beauty and unseen forces. "Gardening, like writing, comes from a balance of deliberative labor and allowing-to-arrive," she says in a telephone interview. "None of us can be foolish enough to think that we create the fertile world, whether the one of vegetables or the one of images and thoughts - but we can help it find shapeliness, and create a space in which certain things can come more fully into their own."

Creating a space in her life is exactly what the poet has done. Rather than teach full time, as she once did, Hirshfield teaches and gives readings several times a month, so that writing can be the center of her life.

She also unplugs the phone each day, so the outside world can't intrude when she works on a poem. "If I don't create the time to write, day after day will just slip by," she says. "The poems won't get written, and I won't have lived the life I most want to live."

Her work space - her bedroom - is conducive to writing. A bookshelf next to the bed holds titles by Czeslaw Milosz, Kenneth Rexroth, and Elizabeth Bishop, among others, and a stack of paper. On one side of the sheets are early drafts of other poems. "It's a bit like a compost heap," she says, "out of which new poems rise."

That recycling, or rediscovering, has been a constant theme for decades, on and off the page. Her garden, for example, was overrun with raspberry brambles when she bought her house 20 years ago. But until she began pulling the bushes, she couldn't see the paths, stone work, and plant beds that lay beneath. The same thing happens in her poems, where one precise image - a horse, a piece of clay, or a button is carefully rendered. Then she unearths layer after layer of association. "Writing a poem is an act of discovery, not the recording of some already completed experience," she explains. "It's a way to search for what you don't know or perhaps for what you know, but don't yet know you know."

This excerpt from the poem "Rebus" shows how her work unfolds from image to image:

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