Sun Under Wood extends and deepens Hass's ongoing explorations of nature
and human history, solitude and the bonds of children, parents, and
lovers. Here his passion for apprehending experience with language - for
creating experience with language - finds supple form in poems that
embrace all that is alive and full of joy. Yet Hass's most seductive and
indelible lyrics reside in an exquisitely fragile moment: there is a
dark undercurrent rising in this text, an increasingly acute sense of
mortality in a world "so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of
singing."