Summer snow New poems

In this ruminative, endlessly clever book, Pulitzer Prize--winner Hass (The Apple Trees at Olema) turns his eye toward nature, love, and even drone strikes, as, when chronicling a visit to a Las Vegas Air Force base for a protest, he juxtaposes the specter of commerce at a nearby casino with headlines detailing drone-related deaths in the Middle East. Though death may be the prevailing theme, these poems are far from dirges, as images of his Northern California environs shimmer with life: "you can almost hear the earth sigh/ As it sucks up the rain." Hass experiments with form, vacillating between long and short lines, stanzas and long unbroken blocks of verse. His language is lofty but accessible, as in "The Archaeology of Plenty," a loose, associative riff about finding meaning in a callous and capricious world, in which the poet argues for poetry as a cure for existential dread: "reach into your heavy waking,/ The metaphysical nausea that being in your life,/ With its bearing and its strife, its stiffs,/ Its stuff, seems to have produced in you,/ Reduced you to, and make something with a pleasing,/ Or teasing, ring to it." Hass is a rarity, a poet's poet and a reader's poet who, with this newest endeavor, bestows a precious gift to his audience. (Jan.)

In "Patches of Snow in July," former U.S. Poet Laureate Hass sets up the image that is central to this poem and to the collection: "the way the white patches of snow in the saddles of bare rock between the/ massive peaks glittered in the sun undid me." As he remembers seeing leftover bits of melting snow in the Sierra Mountains, he associates the memory with various people who are no longer alive with the poem, then suggests how he was moved ("undone") by the persons he is elegizing. Nearly all of these poems refer to someone Hass has known personally or professionally, with one of the most evocative poems referring to his parents. Hass infuses his work with numerous references to nature, which tend to fill out the portrait of the deceased: "death's song is the color of wet violets." Although there are a few haikulike poems, most of the collection is composed of longer prose poems. VERDICT Overall, this collection of elegies has a pleasing, conversational tone (despite the morbidity of its subject), as if Hass is reading nature not to glean a message but to hear and see what nature has to say. For all libraries.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD