The poems in Robert Hass's new collection--his first to appear in a
decade--are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and
in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work
is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.
His familiar landscapes are here--San Francisco, the Northern California
coast, the Sierra high country--in addition to some of his oft-explored
themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of
history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books,
domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes
emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer,
and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czeslaw
Milosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman,
Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a
surpris-ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the
demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican
desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid
present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to
be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book
Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and
every-thing else, into his poetry."
Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this
beautiful collection is no exception.
