Jane Hirshfield's newest metrical c...

Jane Hirshfield's newest metrical compositions collected in The October Palace, are indeed like palaces: they are invariably well-constructed, watertight, and in subordination to autocratic control. And most of the time, these palaces are also inhabited according to an intense (and intensely human) sensibility. Hirshfield's fill outed attention span--nurtured perhaps by dint of the Buddhist strains that make this Northern Californian a distinctly "Pacific Rim" poet--enables her to sustain her metaphors. In "Percolation," for example, coffee-making becomes emblematic of
...all the ways matter be enamoured ofs matter, ...