Jane Hirschfield reads from her new book THE BEAUTY at UCB Lunch Hour Poetry

  Robert Haas, a colleague, and Jane Hirshfeld in the Morrison Library

Jane read from her new collection, She started with "Fado" which means "fate" in Portugal.  She was introduced by Haas as a "plain speaking poet".  He linked her with Denise Levertov, Gary Synder.

Jane talks about the interconnections in life and their perishability, about the personal life and our argument or agreement...  She reads "My Proteins", after a NYT article she read.  It was an audio featured poem in "the New Yorker".  Proteus changes shapes.

Jane  reads "Mosquito".  He, I, We.   A memorable line:  "When we fall into beauty, the isolate dissolves."  

The poet reads "My Species" and then "A Cottony Fate"  A line: "I, too, am 60.  There was no other life."

Jane continues with "Quartz Clock", "I wake Early", and "In a kitchen where Mushrooms were Washed".   She with good humor says, she now knows how a truffle pig feels.

The poems that follow are:  "My Life Was the Size of My Life'.   "A Chair in Show", dedicated to her friends in the East.  and "A Person Protests to Fate."

Another line surfaces, "Love practices in the body after abandonment."  in  12 Pebbles. From this collection Jane reads:   "The Woman, The Tiger"; "Immigration and Hunger", "Humbling: An Assay" and then she moves on to:  "Works & Love, ..and the line, "This dignity we allow barn owl eagle ..." Two Linen Handkerchiefs" and "How could you be dead these two years, these, still."  Then, "Zen Plus Anything is a world."  The lines:  "Add salt to hunger...add death to life."   She ends with "Souvenir", and this line remains, "I wanted my Fate to be Human.  Yes. No.  A day a life slips through them...old shoes, old rules. "

Hirschfeld was generous in her reading, and focussed on the poems, not herself.  It was a pleasure to hear her again...You can hear the reading yourself on UCal Berkeley's website.  Lunchtime poems. Always the first Thursday of the month.