"Hope is the hardest love we carry."
- Jane Hirshfield
"One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen."
"as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us."
"Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being."
"One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem."
"The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not."
"To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness..."
"Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening o..."
"Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the hear..."
"Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it."