Zen, Meaning, and Craft in Jane Hirshfield’s Poetry: Heartshoots

Zen, Meaning, and Craft in Jane Hirshfield’s Poetry: Heartshoots is the first scholarly volume to be dedicated to the large body of work produced by North American Zen poet, Jane Hirshfield. The volume is co-authored by a Zen Buddhist scholar and a poetry scholar, who are both practising poets. Its five chapters cover format and structure; three fruitful approaches to the poetry; Zen and the problem of desire; Hirshfield’s response to the more-than-human world and her warnings to humanity not to ignore the ecological crisis; belonging, loss, and the solace of poetry. The book portrays poetry as a ＂heartshoot＂ that can bridge the artificial divide between external and internal worlds and can draw forth compassion as well as delight. In Hirshfield’s hands, it mobilises the considerable power of cognitive, verbal, and semantic surprise to lead the reader gently to new insights about the connectedness of all that is.

Deirdre C. Byrne is the Director of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), a practising poet, and a Professor of English Studies at the University of South Africa. She is the Editor of the academic journal Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. Her main research interest is in women’s poetry and speculative fiction. Her work on feminist readings of speculative fiction has been published in Extrapolation; Entanglements and Weavings: Diffractive Approaches to Gender and Love; Fluid Gender, Fluid Love; and Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature.

Garth J. Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Africa and a practising poet. He has a long-term interest in ordinary people’s lived experiences of spirituality and his research on this has been published in Contemporary Buddhism, Religious Education, and The Journal for the Study of Religion in South Africa. He is also a regular contributor to Oxford annotated Bibliographies in Buddhism series.