by Robert Hass
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Product Description
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 Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surprisingly 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 everything else, into his poetry." Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 haas does it again, 2008-06-11
Robert Haas, former poet laureate USA, has a problem: he doesn't write enough. But then that may be our problem. His readership hangs on every poem, every word in every poem. And they (WE, US)WANT MORE.
Not high flown nor lofty, his verse covers his chosen terrain, ordinary things from the ground-view vantage point. It takes us over the moguls and the pot holes with enough bounce that we know these rough spots are there but we're not jolted skyward out of our seats.
Obscurantism has had its day with the passing last century's lords of the obscure, Pound, Eliot, Stevens and their ilk.
Haas, Collins, are the 'ilks' we clamor for today.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A beautiful book , 2008-06-11
Embrace The Light; a women's story through poetry to touch your heartPoetry which will inspire the heart, mind and soul
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 2008-05-22
I'm thrilled that Hass won it, as no one deserves it more. It's been a decade since his last book, and the contemplation of time and materials he experienced has constructed this continually delighting and surprising book, which I'd put up there with Field Guide and Praise as my three favorite books by Hass, who has become one of our most vocal ecological poets.
0 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
 Never received, 2008-04-11
I can't say whether or not Bob Hass' recent book is a winner because I ordered the book through Amazon and I never received it. On that basis I must give both the book dealer and Amazon an F in terms of service and fulfilling orders. Of Hass I'll reserve my judgment until I've had a chance to read his latest book.
Lee Perron
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Substance of Memory, 2008-04-10
"Time and Materials," the new collection of poems by Robert Hass is serious and reflective, but also playful and passionate. The themes of these poems are various; sex, war, art, the planet, the relationships between men and women, and language itself are all explored by Hass.
However, two of the dominate themes in the work are time and the nature of memory. Hass's examination of time and the materials of memories suggest that many of our recollections may contain more dreams and imaginations than we realize, and that over time the experiences we have, or think we have, are unintentionally revised and rescripted.
In, "Mouth Slightly Open," one of the shorter poems in the collection, thought and belief tumble together to create the possibility of an experience, a waking dream that leaves the subject, an oft-repeated `you', with only the memory of a possibility.
The body a yellow brilliance and a head
Some orange color from a Chinese painting
Dipped in sunset by the summer gods
Who are also producing that twitchy shiver
In the cottonwoods, less wind than river,
Where the bird you thought you saw
Was, whether you believe what you thought
You saw or not, and then was not, had
Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness
That hums in you now, and is not bad
Or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear.
The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.
In the poem titled, "Then Time", Hass treats time as both a subject and a technique. The subjects of the poem, a man and woman, slide from the present (which becomes the past) to the future (which becomes the present), going from exhausted lovers "very busy wringing out each other's bodies" to old acquaintances having dinner, each silently reminiscing on what they were to each other and who they have become. At one point, "She asks him if he thinks about her. `Occasionally,' / He says, smiling. `And you?' `Not much,' she says, / `I think it's because we never existed inside time.'" Hass seems to be suggesting that the young are able to break free from the measured march of time to somehow live, however fleetingly, outside the constraints of the past, the present and the future of their lives.
This poem is a testament to Hass's prowess as a poet. He not only manages to distill the lifetimes of two subjects, their passion and their disillusionment, down to their respective essences, but he structures the poem in a way that reveals the paradoxical nature of time. By concentrating on two brief moments separated by twenty years, Hass brings the readers attention to both the fleeting and endless nature of time.
Mention must be made of the style of the poems. Hass has a love of language that manifests itself in a willingness to play, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, with syntax and semantics. A few good examples of this playfulness are the poems, "Breach and Orison," "Time and Materials," "Poet's Work," and "A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noon." In the latter poem, Hass even points out that, "The syntax is a little haywire there."
When he is not playing with the syntax or semantics of the English language, Hass seems to have revitalized the run-on sentence. This phenomenon can be found in the poem above, "Mouth Slightly Open." The first eleven lines of the poem are one sentence! Nails on a chalkboard for grammarians, but Hass changes these once egregious grammatical errors into breathtaking lines that work to quickly pull the reader through the poems. Many of these poems are like wild horses at full gallop, beautiful, powerful and unrestrained, and Hass has offered the reins to his readers. So take them up. This slim volume of poetry will not disappoint.
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