Sun under Wood

by Robert Hass

Robert Hass demonstrates once again the unmistakable intelligence and original voice that have won him both literary acclaim and the affection of a broad general readership. Here Hass extends and deepens his 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. Sun Under Wood is the most impressive collection yet from one of our most accomplished poets.

Genres: Poetry, American, Literature, Adult

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.

Reviews

[Cory]

I picked this book up during a weekend home (that is,
where my parents live), from a shelf of my treasured titles; somewhere
between Allen Ginsberg (first edition, signed, personalized) and
Arthur Miller (special edition, signed), sat Robert Hass (first edition, signed,
personalized). It happened to be National Poetry Month, and,
after I started to reread his book, Hass
won the Pulitzer for his most recent title -
as if my selecting him on a weekend home had something to do
with the greater selection. You're welcome, Mr. Hass.

The signature and "For Cory, best," stem from a visit he made to my college
when he was teaching at my school's rival
years ago. He read in a small classroom,
and I remember him perched on the edge of a desk, reading from there
not a podium,
and us students gathered around him, as if at the feet of the wise man,
a memory probably aided by the selection of haiku he read that day,
that he had translated,
along with his own poems. He had a kind of Buddhist air about him,
calm,
and I remember thinking, "Maybe I chose to attend the wrong school,"
because that day, in close proximity to a man of letters
his steady voice and smile,
his one (loafered?) foot on the ground, the other swinging as he balanced
on the edge of the desk
I thought
"I'm glad I'm here right now."
Yet that feeling was fleeting, as was Hass's visit, and I was already finding it
harder and harder
to find reasons to stay.

Now, reading his poems again, I find
a sense of humanity
some joy, sensuality, humor, suffering, and hard-won wisdom.
I find more to relate to than I ever could have when I first read these poems.
I find these lines in a poem called "Faint Music":

"I had the idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps -
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing."

I find that ten years after first reading these words
I am still waiting
for the singing.

[hence]

duhh its incredible

[Christina M M Rau]

The Cons: A lot of the poems are about nature. Birds. A cat. One way to get me to turn away from a poem is to write about a horse. I don't remember any horses here, but I skimmed through the nature stuff, so one might be roaming around in some verse. The problem is that he's got these great lines, and sometimes I found really moving imagery and diction after forcing myself to continue to read a poem when the first line is about an animal. Also, some of his poems he writes twice, as in, he writes the poem and then offers a second poem entitled Notes on that poem, so really it's two poems. I tended to like the Notes better than the first poem. Finally, he's got a lot of paragraph, long-line, prosey stuff, and it was hard to plow through. He's tricky, though. Some poems he starts with short lined verse and then suddenly switches, and since I was in the midst of it, I had to continue. Tricky, very tricky.

The Pros: "Forty Something" is a short poem, very short, about a woman threatening to stab a lover in the heart if he leaves her. Nice! "Shame: An Aria" may as well be the story of my life. It's funny and dry and sweet and true. The piece on Frida Kahlo is unique and intriguing. "English: An Ode" is wordplay at the pinnacle of poetry. Using other languages, etymology, and polyptoton (fun word! look it up!), Hass creates a melding of language that flaunts his strong grasp of a difficult entity.

[C]

Not my favorite Hass, but still there are many moments of lucidity and beauty. His shorter poems captured me more, but I did enjoy seeing echoes of his previous work in the longer pieces (a man eats bread in one poem the way a woman "dismantles bread" in the famous "Meditation at Lagunitas"). The poem below is Hass at his best.


Our Lady of the Snows

In white,
the unpainted statue of the young girl
on the side altar
made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.

When my mother was in a hospital drying out,
or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,
I would slip in the side door,
light an aromatic candle,
and bargain for us both.
Or else I'd stare into the day-moon of that face
and, if I concentrated, fly.

Come down! come down!
she'd call, because I was so high.

Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother's closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.

[Tom]

Poetry is kind of a magic trick when it's done well. Good poetry cuts through the crap, the window dressing, everything you think you're going to find in it and puts in your ears the sound of an authentic human voice. The voice is so authentic that at times it's as real and present to you as your own internal monologue. Maybe more so.

Yes, Hass was the US Poet Laureat. Yes, for so many reasons, his bona fides are unassailable. But when I read this, I heard that voice. I experienced that wonderful magic trick. Almost never did I feel the urge to roll my eyes because he was being "poemy" or trying to be too clever by half. If it doesn't work in places, that's only because the subjects are so ambitious (if someone aims for Mars, do you dismiss the expedition as a failure if it only makes it as far the moon?).

I'll be adding this one to my permanent collection.

[Jason Morrison]

Occasional banger; otherwise not a favorite

[Carey Calvert]

The last book I've read this year may be the least recent as well.

Robert Hass's Sun Under Wood was first published in 1996, while Hass was winding down his tenure as poet laureate for the United States.

I sought out this fourth book of poems by the famed author of his most recent collection, Summer Snow, based solely on the recommendation of Faint Music, the 13th poem in this collection ... and this line alone, seemingly an assignment, as if chiding himself, chills.

"Maybe you need to write a poem about grace."

"When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might ... release them from themselves."

It doesn't.

I didn't know, but at the time Hass was dealing with his own interruptions - the deaths of his parents, his childhood with an alcoholic mother, divorce from his wife of many years, and the mother of his three grown-up children.

"A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants from the sound of it ..."

These poems were meant to fray.

From 'Sonnet,'

"I had the idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps -
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing."

In Regalia For A Black Hat Dancer, Hass takes it a bit further, shedding any illusions, yet determined to find a path.

"Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away, but you can teach yourself to see its size."

In The Seventh Night, romanticism is no longer an aspiration but a destination:

"'OK, would the last of you folks to leave, if you can remember it, just put out the stars?'

which they did

... and the white light everywhere in that silence was white paper."

[C. Varn]

Hass's tendency to enrich his verse in the natural world and in plain language while he still manages to delve his divorce and his mother's alcoholism. The swerves between confessionalism and naturalistic verse can be a little jarring. Furthermore, the references to place sometimes enrich the poems but sometimes feel like idiosyncratic memories for Hass. Still, Hass remains unpretentious and richly expressionistic.

[Sheri Fresonke Harper]

Thoughtful poems that linger and delve into the inner world. These poems seem to delve into the poet's emotional state following his divorce and also into his mother's alcoholism. The poems are very connected to the mythic world and to nature. They play with language and also with ideas, mixing long connected poems and short poems into a very pleasant collection to read.

[Aaron Bauer]

This is a wonderful collection of poems, especially the shorter poems nearer to the beginning of the book. At the end, the poems get really long and a little difficult to get through--think John Ashbery (a la Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror) but more coherent.

[K M]

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this. Back later with thoughts...

[Matthew Gustafson]

When he’s good, he’s one of the best poets ever. Otherwise, it’s a whole lot of birds and vague abstractions that do not move me.

[Alina]

I read this book sequentially. The poems kept on breaking my heart. It was unbearable with respect to pain and beauty alike. I kept on thinking, okay, this is the kind of experience Hass’s poems have to offer. It is already full—there was no reason to expect any further places of being to be taken into. And yet the poems kept on surprising me. By the end of this collection, I can say that Hass is one of my favorite poets I’ve read. It's remarkable, how he deals with: (a) the mystical beauty of nature, (b) what it’s like to be a child and to remember that as an adult, (c) what it’s like to suffer a breakup (in Hass’s case a divorce), and (d) what it means to go about life in a manner that is continuously primarily engaged with art (either creating or appreciating it) rather than in a manner that is more “realistic” or “sober”—and while there is certainly a grain of truth that to go about life this way is less realistic, in another sense, it is super-realistic.

Also something I was particularly struck by, and don’t think I’ve noticed in any other poet before, is the earnestness of Hass’s wonder at his emotions and nature around him and his desire to understand. In each poem, it feels like he writes it not just to make a piece of art but to make discoveries and to come to a deeper understanding of what was initially troubling, such that often, the initial trouble dissolves once the bigger picture is seeable.

Here are some lines I liked:

“They [“a pair of delicate copper-red, needle-fine insects”] don’t carry around this half-mated longing up out of childhood/ and then go looking for it everywhere./ And so, I think, they can’t wound each other the way we do…. Though it is perhaps also true/ that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us/ when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond/ and the pond’s green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a/ moment/ in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope/ it has been throwing into abyss after abyss” (from “Dragonflies Mating”)

“Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was/ writing at the kitchen table,/ Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled/ defiant terror, like a thing with no choices,/ And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix/ of arrest and liquid motion, came to the table/ And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quieted, and/ to my surprise did not leave again” (from “Iowa City: Early April”)

“Walking down to Heart’s Desire beach in the summer evenings/ of the year my marriage ended—/ though I was hollowed out by pain,/ honeycombed with the emptiness of it,/ like the bird bones on the beach/ the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season—/ such surprising lightness in the hand—/ I don’t think I could have told the pain of loss/ from the pain of possibility,/ though I knew they weren’t the same thing” (from "Regalia For a Black Hat Dancer”)

“At night/ when we had got too tired to talk, were touching all along our bodies… I’d think of my wife, her lover… If she were there, rare mornings/ that she was—we did a lot of car keys, hurried dressing, last kisses/ on swollen lips at 2 AM — I’d turn to her, stare at her sleeping face,/ and want to laugh from happiness. I’d even think: then years/ from now we could be screaming at each other in a kitchen, and want to laugh… I’d stare at the ceiling, bewildered, and feel a grief/ so old it could have been some beggar woman in a fairy tale./ I didn’t know you could lie down in such swift, opposing currents./ Also two emptinesses, I suppose, the one/ joy comes from, the one regret, disfigured intention, the longing/ to be safe or whole flows into when it’s disappearing” (also from "Regalia For a Black Hat Dancer”)

[Mark Schultz]

Sun Under Wood: Poems, by Robert Hass, 1996. It was oddly pleasant reading Sun Under Wood. The writing is almost placid, though so much of the book was about various kinds of loss. Nearly all of Hass’ poems in this volume contain simple and beautiful descriptions of the natural life or landscape surrounding the speaker in the poem. The poems are immersed in the beings and doings of life beyond the human tale being told. Hass’ writing simply flowed in these poems.

Here's a favorite passage, the first four stanzas from “The Woods in New Jersey.”

Where there was only grey, and brownish grey,
And greyish brown against the white
Of fallen snow at twilight in the winter woods,

Now an uncanny flamelike thing, black
and sulphur-yellow, as if it were dreamed by Audubon,
Is turned upside down in a delicate cascade

Of new green leaves, feeding on whatever mites
Or small white spiders haunt underleafs at stem end.
A magnolia warbler, to give the thing a name.

The other name we give this overmuch of appetite
And beauty unconscious of itself is life.
And that that kept the mind becalmed all winter? –

The poem brought something to me – made the life of those woods (the Pine Barrens, perhaps?) present to me. It is my favorite poem from this volume. Beautiful, accurate nature writing in poetic form and with poetic insight.

As I was paging through my paperback copy of Sun Under Wood after purchasing it at a used-and-new local bookstore, I realized that Hass had signed the title page. I’m not big on autographs or signed copies, but I liked seeing this fine writer’s script, too.

[EL]

Robert Hass is a poet, and he knows it despite the anxiety and fear of schmaltz he expresses in the last poem in this collection, “Interrupted Meditation.” He tries to avoid it by using nature as a mirror, and most of the time really, it works. “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide,” Donald Woods Winnicott said, and “Sonnet” might be one of my favorite poems, ever, for how it expresses longing—by projecting onto trees.

So even if he doesn’t “excel at metaphor” (“Interrupted Meditation”), he writes some visceral, rip-through-your-breath images. Some of my favorite lines I’ve ever read, that have changed the way I see certain things—tree trunks, ospreys’ cries, nectarines, persimmons. Other times, the poems veered into prose-y, unfiltered thoughts and conversations, quotation marks and all. Made me think some of these should have been done as short pieces of prose instead. Calling them verse is pushing it.

On the whole, these are poems about language, self-expression, coping with a breakup, childhood trauma, loss, search for meaning. There’s a poem about his mother’s nipples, two mentions of period-stained underwear in two separate poems. This is a good collection for the heartbroken, contemplative, and artists, but especially poets. The man’s wife left him and he needs to write to get through it. So we get some beautiful lines and also some hapless rambling. But he’s trying his best. Me too though. We’re trying our best.

[AlliD]

"Dragon flies Mating" - "...though it is perhaps also true that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond and the pond's green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a/ moment/ in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope/ it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing / shimmers/ from every color the morning sun has risen into."

This excerpt resonates with me. It's what one might include on a wedding program, if wedding programs always told the truth. We don't know how the coupling will work out in this excerpt, but Hass makes a supposition: "they can't separate probably/ until it is done." (I enjoy his endings. "Why of course!" I always think, but they always surprise me.

In this collection, memories and personal histories collage with historical anecdotes, myth, reflections on current events, travel notes, the history of place, an onomastic catalog of flora and fauna¬¬–– all to circle the emotional state, like a hunter and not like a hunter, I think, to capture the intricacies of mood and feeling. What else are lyric poems for? The mother makes an appearance, and various couples, diverse landscapes, but mostly I wonder if we are exploring how one trusts oneself, trusts another. I might be projecting my own inner states on the collection, but again, what else are lyric poems for, if not to tease out our own understandings, our own psychic dilemmas?

[Pt Bunch]

I didn't enjoy this book: more a comment on myself than Mr. Hass. It's relentless dark pathos felt self-absorbed. "My Mother's Nipples" eleven pages of various styles felt like a therapy session:

"So, back in California, it was with some interest that I retraced the drive from San Francisco to Santa Rose which my parents made in 1939..."

Hass goes on to expose that his brother was conceived out of wed-lock. Writing as therapy is great, but doesn't make for great reading.

The book is much better read allowed, as is most poetry, and there are moments of beauty:

Butterflies-
tiny blues with their two-dot wings like quotation marks
or an abandoned pencil sketch of a face. They hover lightly
over lupine blooms, whirr of insects in the three o'clock sun

But next stanza we're back to bleak:

She sat on the couch sobbing, her rib cage shaking
from it's accumulated abyss of grief and thick sorrow.

It comes off as unnecessarily obtuse, like a zen sutra.

Also two emptinesses, I suppose, the one
joy comes from, the other regret, disfigured intention, the longing
to be safe or whole flows into when its disappearing.

Is the craft great? I'm not qualified to judge. I am qualified to judge it as dreary and self-centered.

[Daniel Klawitter]

"I had the idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing."

Hass sings his singular music all through this book about a variety of subjects: but mostly his mother's alcoholism as well as his divorce.

"Regalia For A Black Hat Dancer" is one of my favorite poems of his: an extended 12-page poem about loss (and art and spirituality and nature and the quest for wholeness) that dances between the geography of Berkeley and Korea with great linguistic dexterity and some truly startling images. And towards the conclusion of the poem, we get these great lines:

"Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away,
but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.
Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.
Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,
and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash
and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.
Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.
If you're lucky, you're hungry."

[David Price]

Robert Hass was one of my favorite poet discoveries in my American Poetry class. he reminded me a lot of Gary Snyder, who is my favorite poet. Unfortunately, this collection mostly went right over my head. it merits a reread. He seems to be working with a lot of material that necessitates background knowledge before approaching the poems. However I really enjoyed the following...

1. Happiness
2. Dragonflies Mating
3. My Mother's Nipples
4. Forty Something

I will definitely read more of his poetry in the future.

[Agnieszka]

Uneven, and missing diacritics in Polish place and people names, which as Miłosz’s translator he should know enough to include and insist on. It may be an odd thing to fixate on but a poet should be careful with borrowed words, and treat them well. How can I know the borrowed Korean, Spanish, and Native American names and stories aren’t equally awry? So I lose trust in the work and have very little patience to indulge its self indulgence.

[Michael Patton]

After reading a perfect piece of prose writing by Hass in "Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart", I checked this book out from my public library. I must admit, I was a little disappointed--perhaps because my expectations were stratospheric. For that reason, I'll give this book three stars. I wonder how I'd respond to "Sun Under Wood" now. In any case, I recommend that prose piece to any man or woman on the planet.

[Margie]

This must have been the second time I read this book, although I have no memory of the first. Several lines were underlined and a few pages dog-eared. However, in spite of a few compelling lines, I don’t connect deeply with much of Hass’ poetry, which I believe comes from an essential difference in world view. That said, his poem Faint Music is in this selection, which has been a favorite since I read it on a blog about fifteen years ago.

[Lizzy]

I love Hass' narrative style of poetry.
But my high opinion of his work begins to wilt, as I read more of his poems. Whereas in the past I'd have accept lines pondering how a stranger packs her underwear as not quite appropriate yet slightly sexy, now they come off as lascivious and completely inappropriate. Being a poet is not an excuse for reducing women to sexual objects.

[James Passaro]

Meh, Sun underwhelming. Some of the poems were long rambles of assorted thoughts that I found hard to connect. There seemed to be a thread of divorce and the voice's relation to motherhood. The best poem was My Mother's Nipples.

[Kenneth]

I had the idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps--
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

From "Faint Singing"

[Francisca]

*3.5*

[Liz Shine]

Has is the perfect mix of philosopher and nature observer. Reading his work is always a delight and an inspiration.

[SA]

Beware: these poems have teeth.

[Richard]

3.5

[Ian Carpenter]

Disappointing given how blown away I was by his Summer Snow. I'm glad I read that first. This lacks the focused urgency and power of that other volume.