Review by New York Times Review
THE publication of a volume of selected poems is an appropriate occasion to appraise a poet's career, and an equally appropriate occasion to wonder why we use the word "career" in connection with poetry at all. Many readers would agree with Randall Jarrell's definition of a poet as someone "who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times." This assumes that writing poetry is mostly a matter of waiting and hoping, which in turn raises questions about how confident we can be in discussing (to say nothing of criticizing) a poet's development. As long as the writer in question makes a valiant effort to prepare himself for revelation -as long as he greets every raindrop by waving a putter, like Bishop Pickering in "Caddyshack" - is it really his fault if the lightning striketh not? Robert Hass's book THE APPLE TREES AT OLEMA: New and Selected Poems (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $34.99) is a milestone in what is generally regarded as one of the more successful careers (that word again) in contemporary American poetry. Hass won the Yale Younger Poets competition with his first book, "Field Guide," in 1972; since then he's picked up a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, two National Book Critics Circle awards (once for poetry, once for criticism), the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the United States poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, has been a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has translated haiku selections from Basho, Buson and Issa, as well as numerous books by the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, his former Berkeley colleague. As poetic résumés go, Hass's is about as gold-plated as it gets. And indeed, the best work here is terrific. Hass is frequently referred to as a "West Coast poet," which makes sense to the extent that his work involves Californian flora, fauna and locales, but is more problematic as an indication of temperament (believe it or not, New York also contains mellow poets fixated on organic chard). His writing is densely literary and cultured in a laid-back, faculty lounge sort of way; one isn't surprised to find a poem beginning "On the morning of the Käthe Kollwitz exhibit," or to discover a five-page sequence about grad school romance ("Like Landor's line -/she was meandering gold, pellucid gold"). Most poems here involve long, loping free verse lines and occasional haiku-like fragments. In Hass's hands, both approaches resist closure and convey a slightly earnest sensuality that often involves plain old physical desire (there are a lot of women here, and they're regularly being "made love to") but also emerges in lovely, exacting natural descriptions: "In the pools/ anemones, cream-colored, little womb-mouths." Hass's greatest strength as a poet, however, is his equanimity, a quality that sets him apart from peers who rely on a sense of imbalance. That imbalance can register as pressure (that is, the language of the poem may seem inadequate to the task it's asked to perform), or it can involve deliberate disjunctions in voice, tone, syntax and so forth. Reading a good Hass poem, though, is like watching a painter whose brush strokes are so reassuringly steady you hardly notice how much complex and unsettling depth has been added to the canvas. Consider, for instance, the beginning of "Songs to Survive the Summer," from Hass's second book, "Praise": These are the dog days, unvaried except by accident, mist rising from soaked lawns, gone world, everything rises and dissolves in air, whatever it is would clear the air dissolves in air and the knot of day unties invisibly like a shoelace. The gray-eyed child who said to my child: "Let's play in my yard. It's O.K., my mother's dead." That final, potentially melodramatic line is brought off with a poised efficiency that seems inevitable, and characteristic. As Louise Glück has observed, Hass uses a kind of constantly expanding empathy to bind together elements that would ordinarily disrupt a poem. In work like "Santa Lucia," "Against Botticelli" and "The Nineteenth Century as a Song," you feel that Hass has imagined his way into every aspect of each scene he presents. The thing is, each of those poems is at least 30 years old. It's not that Hass hasn't written anything worthwhile in the intervening decades; poems like "Pears," from the 2007 collection "Time and Materials," are worthwhile by any reasonable measure. But his finest work (thus far, anyway) was written early - which returns us again to the problem of a poetic "career." What does it say that this "Selected Poems" lacks the sort of consistent development for which people usually get gold watches? Or, to make the issue a little more modest: What is true of Hass's stronger, earlier poetry that isn't true of his more recent writing? One way to approach this question is to think about the nature of poetic empathy. Empathy involves the intimate understanding of other points of view, but it doesn't necessarily imply pity or kindness. As the poet Katy Lederer writes in her memoir, "Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers," the key to being a good poker player is managing to "empathize with your opponents while remaining devoid of all compassion." Hass's strongest writing demonstrates exactly this sort of dry-eyed approach. "Heroic Simile," which opens his second book, begins: When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. Hass then moves rapidly through a series of scenarios for the imaginary woodsman and his uncle that begins to fray as the speaker realizes he must keep inventing elements to keep the scene going ("I have imagined no pack animal. . . . They are waiting for me to do something"). The poem concludes, simply, "There are limits to imagination." "Heroic Simile" is, then, a poem of imaginative empathy intended to show that however much we may understand the world outside ourselves, we must always return, as Hass puts it, to "separate fidelities." It's not a consoling thought, perhaps, but it's a true one. Hass's later work, though, has been reluctant to embrace this kind of truth. Sometimes empathy bleeds over into self-regard ("What is to be done with our species?"); other times it congeals into a buttery sentimentality ("I want to end this poem singing"). Both outcomes are, of course, the result of wanting boundaries to blur, rather than recognizing them as necessary restrictions. "Meditation at Lagunitas," which directly follows "Heroic Simile" and is Hass's most famous poem, begins in the same dry mode as its predecessor: "All the new thinking is about loss. /In this it resembles all the old thinking." But the poem ends in an altogether damper place: There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. One might say that the problem with Hass's career is that as he's gotten older, his poems have been more willing to say "blackberry, blackberry, blackberry" than to declare, "There are limits to imagination." Still, it's a rare thing for a poet to write genuinely powerful poems; to be struck those all-important five or six times. We can only be grateful to someone who has worked so hard to be rendered incandescent by the lightning, and then welcomed it when it hit.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Long, laddering lines impel you down the page as Hass contemplates the living and the dead, the human and the wild with yearning and philosophic poise. This lustrous retrospective collection, drawn from five previous books, beginning with Field Guide (1973), opens with a generous selection of new poems redolent of Whitman and the blues. Narrative poems are droll and astringent in their musings over love's paradoxes and history's shifting claims, children's pleasures, poverty, and danger. A National Book Award winner and former poet laureate prized for his insights into human nature and our place in the web of life, Californian Hass distills experiences down to their essence as he limns landscapes, portrays friends and loved ones, and imagines the struggles of strangers. The ordinary is cracked open to reveal metaphysical riddles in poems that feel so natural, their formal complexities nearly elude our detection. Legacies and ruptures, sex and food, the journaling impulse to stop time, the strangeness of living, all become catalysts for the tonic perceptions shared by this compassionate master poet who declares, Joy seized me. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hass's first retrospective allows us to trace the development of the narrative voice he began cultivating most powerfully with 1979's Praise. Who can forget their first reading of "Meditation at Lagunitas," in which Hass tells us we call it longing "because desire is full/ of endless distances"? The new poems show Hass at the height of his narrative powers, as in "Some of David's Story," where the dissolution of a loving relationship is told to us in brief anecdotes by David himself. Recent poems from Time and Materials ask direct, bird's-eye view questions: "What is to be done with our species? Because/ We know we're going to die, to be submitted to that tingling of atoms once again." Hass's work derives its strength from how it challenges both breath and line. Few are the poems in which Hass doesn't push his breath, and ours, almost to the point of breaking. He tries to get every word he can into each line, every detail he can into each poem, as though, if these feats are possible, then it's also possible to save some part of the world from dissolution. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
