Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on the first day of each year. ‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me’ is one of the new poems in The Asking, along with poems selected from nine collections published since 1982. It begins with a question the world asks (‘as it asks daily’): ‘And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?’

Outside the window is a mountain: ‘For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, / then to the question.’ Counting things the speaker can make or change – ‘black-eyed peas and collards’, a pudding made from late-season persimmons, a light bulb – she observes the way the world brings sorrow after sorrow. Some are immovable as a mountain; others change, as questions do. ‘The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, / and still they surprised.’ To these she brings postcards and stamps, daily trying to respond.

Among the poem’s long lines is a couplet built of spare, clipped sentences. Stone, Hirshfield writes ‘did not become apple. War did not become peace.’ How then, asks this poem, like many by Hirshfield, do we continue to face the world’s pain?