With the 10 insightful essays in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, poet Jane Hirshfield continues the investigation she began in Nine Gates, into the ways poetry carries meaning and emotional truth. As one of poetry's most respected practitioners, she mounts a passionate argument for its importance and transformational power.
Poetry offers "new ways of perceiving" in complex and interconnected ways, she argues. The poet sees or hears or feels something and, in an act of the imagination, uses the tools of craft--words, images and form--to turn it into something previously unsaid and unknown. Each reader in turn re-creates the poet's imaginative experience. A poem changes us because experience changes us, and so poetry provokes new reactions to the familiar objects and concerns of life, connecting writer and reader and showing both how to see or hear or feel.
By expressing something new, a good poem moves both poet and reader toward emotional enlargement and an increase in awareness. Hirshfield uses examples drawn from poetry and literature, including Horace, Basho and Raymond Carver, and from the natural world and evolutionary science. Additionally, photos and other reproductions of visual art--like that of contemporary Times Square and Maya Lin's original submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition--ground her argument and contribute to the wonder of this collection. But Hirshfield is a poet first, and she anchors Ten Windows with her deep appreciation for poetry's ability to inquire of us how to live and create in a world that will ultimately go on without us. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer