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Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield
(Bloodaxe, 2008)

This is the seventh offering from the Newcastle / Bloodaxe lecture series. Previous publications have included offerings from the likes of Carol Rumens, David Constantine and Jo Shapcott. In this volume Jane Hirshfield, who originally delivered her lectures at Newcastle University in March 2007, “examines the roles of hiddenness, uncertainty and surprise as they appear in poetry and other works of literature”.

Hirshfield begins in Poetry and Hiddenness: Thoreau’s Hound by using Thoreau’s illusive hound as a starting point to make a case for embracing the idea that it is those things hidden from us that can actually provide human beings with some of the central necessities of life. In stating that: “It is our subjectivity of stance, not the world, that creates the unknown,” Hirschfield goes on to outline a literary history of this notion as far back as the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh. She traces the significance of this position through the absence of Achilles for eight books of the Iliad along with Odysseus’ absence in the first four books of the Odyssey. She links the notion of hiddenness to the principles of storytelling in demonstrating that the teller learns what to reveal and what to keep hidden. She also discusses the importance of absence within the context of metaphors stating:

The union, like all metaphor, brings revelation and addition,
as it also covers, complicates, veils.

After establishing this she brings her attention to the force of hiddenness at work in the art and craft of composing a poem. With reference to the writing of Poe, Auden and Frost amongst others, Hirshfield demonstrates how such abstract ideas can become “thoroughly embedded in real life”. She also broaches the life of the writer disguised and at work in the poem.

In her second lecture, Poetry and Uncertainty, Hirshfield concentrates on the dichotomy that uncertainty can broaden and enlarge knowledge. She uses translations of poems by writers such as Czeslaw Milosz, Alberto Caerio and Yehuda Amichai to expertly illustrate her thesis. She shows how “contemporary poets work deeply in the indeterminacy of meaning” as in Paul Celan’s:

Your question – your answer.
Your song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
                                       Eepinnow,                      E-i-o

Finally, in Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise, Hirshfield argues the poetry that consistently has the capacity to astonish is the poetry that lasts. She tests this notion with three in-depth readings of Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy, Oysters by Seamus Heaney and Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost.

Hirschfield’s breadth of knowledge, her ability to navigate complicated trains of thought in a succinct manner and her own experience of writing make this publication an authoritative must for students and enthusiasts interested in the craft and practice of poetry.