Books like The Lives of the Heart

Jane Hirshfield is coming to my village in a couple weeks so I thought I would read some of her work, on the suggestion of my friend and poet Jenn. This is my first experience of her work, and I thought it was bold to take on this subject (of love) and try to make something new of it. I very much liked the poems; she brings a Buddhist sensibility to language and image. She reads and reflects the reading in her poems of Chinese poetry.The Heart’s Counting Knows Only OneIn Sung China,two monks friends for sixty yearswatched the geese pass.Where are they going? one tested the other, who couldn't say.That moment's silence continues.No one will study their friendshipin the koan-books of insight.No one will remember their names.I think of them sometimes,standing, perplexed by sadness,goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,but not yet.As the barely audiblegeese are not yet swallowed; as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost. Or this one:Changing EverythingI was walking againin the woods,a yellow lightwas sifting all I saw.Willfully,with a cold heart,I took a stick,lifted it to the opposite sideof the path.There, I said to myself,that's done now.Brushing one hand against the other,to clean themof the tiny fragments of bark.Her rendition of the varieties of love in this volume is not the reflection of a young person but of one with experience of heartache and complexity as much as passion.Here’s some other lines/images I liked:“How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.”“To sit there among the petals, altering nothing.”“The rains come, the deer slip back into the mountains like hungry, rose-colored smoke.”Of a mare she sees: “The way the left ear swivels into dream.”This is the poetry of small observations, of subtle gestures, and “do not-doing,” as Lao Tsu urged us.“More and more wanting to learn how to leave things be.” I can't wait to hear her read and meet her!