Jane Hirshfield never disappoints---although the poems in the first and last sections were the strongest. The entire collection exudes a Zen influence, using nature and the commonplace to find an emotional and spiritual resignation or reconciliation with the Way of the world. ( )

Perhaps both the best and worst thing about this collection is that HIrshfield shows great affinity for the likes of Basho and other Japanese poets, this is especially evident in a poem like "Anywhere You Look." At their best, these poems reach out from the deep hearts of comon things and into the frayed and astonished world that surrounds them, as in "I Wanted Only a Little." However, most of these poems seem isolated inside an aesthetics of the everyday. Self-contained poems about the nature of chairs or of cleaning mushrooms in the kitchen. They seem almost unnervingly comfortable. The poems are deftly composed, in terms of line and sound, but often they do not call out into the world and its immediate concerns. I suppose poetry might not need that all the time, but when it is absent I, as a reader, am always a bit dissatisfied. ( )