Time and Materials

by Robert Hass

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 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, 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.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Literature, 21st Century, American, The United States Of America, Contemporary

88 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

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

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no doubt in my mind that Robert Hass is an intelligent, sensitive, big-hearted, humane, good-intentioned, human being. His poems manifest these qualities again and again. So if it is enough that a poem is a vehicle for conveying agreeable qualities, then Time and Materials is a fine book of poems. But it isn’t enough for me. Which puts me in a conundrum: what then do I want from a poem? What’s wrong with genial, prolix, often formless verse moseying down the page in a humane, decent way in order to convey humane, decent thoughts and observations and fine-grained sadnesses? In an attempt to provide a partial answer, I’ll start with a favorite quote of mine (and John Berryman’s) from the critic R. P. Blackmur (first published in Poetry magazine, way back in 1935):

“The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of a fresh idiom: language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter at hand but adds to the stock of available reality.”

Blackmur’s is not a perfect definition, but I love how he makes a distinction between poetry and verse, a distinction long lost since nobody these days wants to be considered a versifier. But versifiers are what we get mostly, and Robert Hass is one of them. Although to varying degrees of competence he “expresses the matter at hand,” he never, ever “adds to the stock of available reality.” I am never surprised by a fresh idiom. The language is hunky-dory plain-talk stuff, not as noxiously lapel-grabbing as Billy Collins’ is, but still dull, predictable, and prosy. To use a fussy, old-fashioned word, these poems are not distinguished. Which is to say they are indistinguishable. Can even the hardest of hardcore Robert Hass fan deny that these poems could have been written by a couple dozen different contemporary poets, Philip Schultz, David St. John, William Matthews (deceased, but fairly recent), etc.? Or even tell them apart from the poems written by Maura Stanton, who won the Yale Younger Poets Prize (’75) soon after Hass did (’73) and has been versifying in about the same bland establishment way for just about as long?

Have you ever noticed how almost all American poets, once they are made and become part of the establishment, stop composing? It is as if once they are unequivocally recognized as poets (prizes, tenure, a certain number of books published, in Hass’s case, Poet Laureate) then it follows that they are officially poets and therefore whatever it is they are writing is a poem. This process manifests itself by the kind of poems the American poetry establishment produces. The syntax flattens or heedlessly fragments. The sentence replaces the line (and prose poems become an easy thing to write, rather than being perhaps the most difficult thing to write). Or if the line endures, line breaks and enjambment become random, incoherent. Form is often employed, but it is often difficult to determine why. Compression, concision is lost to garrulousness and prolixity. Attitudes and intentions replaces embodiment: politics, opinions, strings of names (names of plants and animals in particular), grievances (rather than grief; see below) become the excuses (rather than the occasions) for poetry. Poems become stand-ins for autobiography, essays, journalism, letters to the editor, memos. Abstract language engenders abstract ideas (or no ideas at all). A reflexive faith in “the numinous” becomes a kind of easy credential for our poets, and the poems become increasingly divorced from the material world. Like monks levitating for no good reason, sandalled feet leave the ground as our poets start ascending, then circling slowly, blissfully until readers become tiny, indistinguishable dusty earth-bound iotas, ant-sized uniform jots…

Let me be specific. The poems in Time and Materials are “well crafted” as they say, circumspect, often delicate, full of surface effect and off-the-shelf poetic nuance of the sort that has been American poetry’s core establishment mode for thirty years or more. Perhaps the most characteristic Robert Hass maneuver is the fairly standard American poetry use of nature. Nature can always be relied on for a poem’s punch line. Here are a few closing lines from this book:

Evening with its blue and brown,
October night, the sun going down.

***

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.

***

Something not sayable in the morning silence.
The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc.,
Curves the swallows trace in air.

***

Wind in the pines like the faint rocking
Of a crucifix dangling
From a rearview mirror at a stopsign (sic).

***

On Jackson Street with its sea air and the sound of fog horns
At the Gate. I thought it might help to write it down here
That the truth of things might be easier to come to
On a quiet evening in the clear, dry, mountain air.

Of course there is something unfair about an excerpt – you cannot tell from these what wonders lead up to them. But even so, isn’t there a peaceful easy kinda feelin’ kinda poetry going on here? But I think one can get a feel for the easy-going language, the poet as a quiet observer using nature as a cipher to move around filling out the mood. Yes, there is a whiff of self-referential, postmodern awareness of the problem with saying anything (“The aspen doing something,” the “something not sayable” “I thought it might help to write…”) but this is never exactly a crisis for Hass, who will immediately resort to those old Deep Image standbys, things like “morning silence” and “clear, dry, mountain air” and sea air, sea birds, sea smells, and light glittering off sea surfaces, etc. This easy recourse to a breeze and a pine tree and maybe a couple of birds becomes a kind of literary dystrophy afflicting this book. Nothing hangs together. The puppets keep breaking their strings so that their little arms and legs keep falling off.

For me the biggest, most persistent, and least noticed problem with contemporary American poetry is slack diction. Again, Hass is a somewhat reserved poet, he never descends to the reflexive aw shucks hominess the way (again) Billy Collins does, but Hass never rises to the occasion either. There is a rote preciousness to his language, the way birds flit here and there across these little landscapes and light dizzle-dazzles of various surfaces (water, mostly) that sometimes might provide the reader a little frisson of surprise or delight, but mostly seems, well, rote and precious. Hass, like so many poets these days, does not seem to be paying real attention to his language. And even when he does, gets it wrong. There is a very telling moment in a long introduction to a section of poems called “Czeslaw Miŀosz: In Memoriam” that were written in collaboration with Miŀosz towards the end of his life. At one point, Hass was translating some of Miŀosz’s poems and asked Miŀosz whether he wanted to use the word O or Oh. Miŀosz did not understand the difference in English, so Hass set him straight, as follows:

"On the phone I explained that “Oh!” was a long breath of wonder, that the equivalent was, possibly, “Wow!” and that “O!” was a caught breath of wonder and surprise, more like “Huh!”"

Really? For a poet talking to another poet (about what for Miŀosz is a second language), Hass’s definitions here are astonishingly vague, even wrong. What in the world is a “breath of wonder”? Not that I’m an expert on the subject, but I would point out that O! carries in English a definite whiff of the archaic, a poeticism that can still be used but which in a contemporary poem is almost automatically freighted with some degree of irony (or otherwise is heedlessly archaic, the work of an amateur or cluelessly reactionary poet). Oh! is, of course, a word you would encounter in prose. It can be employed in a poem with far less self-consciousness than O! with far less risk of (unintentional) melodrama or bathos. Oh can also be used as a faint-hearted acknowledgement bordering on disapproval (“You’re wearing that dress to the prom? Oh.”). Hass is telling Miŀosz very little that is useful here about O/Oh, but instead grinds through, the way so many of his poems in this book do, a kind of wilting delicacy (that “caught breath of wonder”) that does nothing but provide a shortcut to setting a tone (and God knows Miŀosz didn’t need help with this particular American bad habit). There’s no thinking going on here. Yes, Oh! is “long,” it being 50% longer than O! Poets are not lexicographers, of course, but when sense is constantly eclipsed by muzzy tone-setting and rote dabs of nature-writing, the blur sets in.

***

The Miŀosz bit starts off a section of translations or collaborations that I have mixed feelings about. The poets being translated are Czeslaw Miŀosz, Horace, and Thomas Tranströmer. This section is perhaps the strongest part of the book, although I will take the opportunity here to complain about Tranströmer and Miŀosz, two poet’s poets whose overwhelming appeal escapes me. As for Tranströmer, he’s been beguiling American poets since the sixties when Robert Bly and James Wright discovered him. Tranströmer does indeed have a grim intensity – he is the most Teutonic of surrealists (yes, I know he’s Scandinavian), grays skies beneath which vaguely Wagnerian things transpire and expire:

A dead second when the horse abruptly stiffens,
Then breaks above the gray-blue waterline
Like storm clouds under thunder’s quick antennae

And Vainomoinen heaves in to the sea
(A firemen’s net the compass points unfurl).
Alarm! Alarm! Gulls swarming where he falls…

Vainomoinen is a figure from Baltic mythology, as Hass helpfully explains in a footnote, but I can’t figure out what a firemen’s net has to do with anything. Tranströmer’s poem ends with a bit of skewed nature that is, I guess, surreal:

An enormous tree with scaly bark and leaves
Utterly transparent, crystalline, and behind them
The billowing sails of distant suns glided

Forward in a trance. And an eagle lifts into the air.

Utterly transparent, crystalline leaves? How many suns glided? And another damned bird ending a poem by doing a lofty symbolic bird-thing. No wonder Hass chose to translate this one. But this stuff just seems very pompous after two or three stanzas, not to mention two or three pages, although this poem is more muscular than the rest of the book, so it comes as a small relief. American poets love to love Tranströmer though – it reminds me of how alternative bands back in the 80s always like to claim pedigree from obscure bands that sounded nothing like them – as I recall REM used to tout Pylon and Tractor as major influences. Maybe they were just screwing around with their fans. Or it just wouldn’t be cool for REM to admit that they were influenced by fellow Athens, Georgia (and commercially successful) band The B-52s.

As for Miŀosz, I’ve never understood why he got to be America’s favorite Polish poet when Zbieginew Herbert is so very much better (one of the best in the world, in my opinion). But Miŀosz settled in America and was good at making friends and was willing to allow American poets to rub up against his very real Eastern European tragedy and suffering as if they could thereby gain gravitas. As Miŀosz aged, he grew prolix in an alarming American way, cranking out the sloppy verse and, of course, getting every scrap of it published and praised. I remember a couple years back reading with increasing boredom and restlessness a collection of his essays, which were numinous and luminescent and ecstatic and nothing else, really. Just like his poems. But actually, the Miŀosz bits were not too bad – better than a lot of this book. And the ancient Roman parts were even better -- “Horace: Three Imitations” was possibly the best sustained bit of the book. There is some genuine wit and tension here, although Hass spoils it when he allows his rather predictable politics intrude: ancient Rome’s enemies the Parthians are terrified by soldiers in “the turrets of formidable tanks” followed by the “mother of some young Sunni” and then if we hadn’t taken the hint, we are told about “the interests of Roman oil for Roman honor.” Olive oil, I presume. At least there’s no George W. Caesar making an appearance with his consort Cleopatra Cheney in a gilded barge gliding down the Euphrates or wherever.

***

O politics! When establishment poets run out of autobiographical things to say or acceptably cool foreigners to translate, they resort to politics. Hass is not as bombastic as most, but the last third or so of the book is ruined (and there was not a lot to ruin in the first place) with political poems of the most predictable sort. The coyly entitled “A Poem” is a list of statistics about war casualties from WWII to Iraq done in long lines (or else it is a prose poem – I really cannot tell if the breaks are for the lines or because of typography). Make love, not war. Yes, okay, I get it – all the poets are in agreement about this these days. The poem ends with questionable statistics and virtue:

"In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war
deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the
Twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians.
There are imaginable responses to these facts. The nations of the
world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers. They could
abolish the use of land mines. They could abolish the use of aerial
bombardment in warfare. You would think men would relent."

As for the statistics about combatant vs. civilian deaths, in the first 20 years of the 20th century, during World War I, deaths in the Armenian genocide (civilians all) are said to number in the millions. World War I German civilian deaths as a result of the British naval blockade are also estimated to be somewhere around a million. So my “imaginable response” to these “facts” is that I think these facts need checking. But never mind. You can almost hear the murmur of assent and see the nodding heads of the audience in the auditorium when Hass reads this poem. But even iffy history aside, why does it have to be so poorly written? How’s about abolishing landmines period, rather than just “the use of” landmines? Just how do the “nations of the world” set examples for suicide bombers? Is “aerial bombardment” okay outside of warfare? This is sloppy and poets shouldn’t be sloppy. Beyond the sloppiness, there is nothing deft, surprising, new, fresh, notable, useful or worthwhile here. This is the kind of poem poets write when they want to establish their politically agreeable credentials. The poem that follows this is more blatantly political – “Bush’s War.” This starts out with Hass’s pointless lack of economy:

"I typed the brief phrase, “Bush’s War,”
At the top of a sheet of white paper
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way…"

This has to be the least promising beginning of a poem I have ever read. Look at all the filler: yes, “Bush’s War” is indeed a “brief phrase.” Good to know the paper is white (I feared Hass uses lavender or key-lime-pie-green paper). There is the usual gassing on: “made luminous by reason” which sounds great until you try to put it together with “set the facts out in an orderly way” which strikes me about the last thing a poem should set out to do. Fine, if you are writing an op-ed piece or a scholarly essay… which is what this poem winds up being, in a slapdash poemy way. Later on, Hass treats us to a list of 20th century horrors in an orderly way but without any attempt to set context. Yes, the firebombing of Tokyo was horrible. So too was Auschwitz and “the displays of falls of hair, the piles / Of monogrammed valises, spectacles…” Hass is sad about these things and believe it would be better they had never happened, but shouldn’t some distinction be made between a fascist state committing genocide and the western democracies’ airplanes dropping bombs on fascist capital cities? What good is such a list beyond providing a catalog of disarticulate horrors? Even if you think this is sufficient, look at the slovenliness of his writing: the Nazis were not creating “displays” with the piles of hair – they were using the hair as a cheap way to insulate U-boats. I realize the piles of hair are used as displays now, some sixty years later, but Hass does not bother to make this distinction. There are no distinctions, just a blur of comfortably correct speechifying.

Ah, the persistence of fame: I just noticed (June, 2019) that "Bush's War" was in the Best American Poetry 2007 anthology (pp. 46-49). And as everybody knows, if it is in "Best American Poetry" it is a Best American Poem. Or, rather, to steal a line from Howard Nemerov, "best" in "Best American Poetry" has the same force as "beauty" does in "Beauty Shoppe."

Let me take a moment here to editorialize: I do not care one way or another if a poet wears his political heart on his sleeve. Nor do I care what kind of politics he espouses. All I care about is that she writes real, live actual poems. When she doesn’t do this, I start complaining. The problem nowadays with so many American poets is that they feel that they have to use their status as poet to “speak truth to power” and whatnot. Fine. Just compose poems – real, live actual, etc. poems – when you do so, or keep your politicking to prose. Furthermore, keep in mind Emily Dickinson did not say a single thing about the Civil War, or the abolition of slavery. And Wallace Stevens never mentioned Auschwitz. And both Berryman and Lowell looked like fools complaining about Dwight D. Eisenhower. And remember that Robert Frost once said poetry should be about griefs, not grievances.

***

Time and Material is the first collection of poems by Hass in a long time, which in itself is an event worthy of praise – almost all American poets grossly overproduce now. This book, meager and disappointing as it is, is “the first to appear in a decade” as the dust jacket proclaims, and is not the result of a relentless book-every-two-years production schedule met by most establishment poets. That Hass apparently took his time is a testament to his scruples and tact. Also, there is no cynicism or cheap irony in the typical Robert Hass poem, which is a good thing (Frederick Seidel can grow tiresome). But still, with Hass considered to be one of America’s best poets…after ten years all we get is this? Time and Materials is a disappointment. It is too easy, too slack, too pointless. Yes, it is kind and gentle and wistful, but as a reader, I don’t care whether or not Robert Hass is a nice, decent, humane guy – Philip Larkin was pretty much a first class jerk and he wrote marvelous, sometimes heartbreakingly gorgeous poems. The only thing that matters is the poems. Hass and many of his contemporaries baffle me – I simply do not understand poets who do not swing for the fences, who are content to just noodle around for decade after decade, giving vent to their political opinions, daub in a few sandpipers and some wind and the scent of the sea coming in off the Gate. I can’t see why Hass bothered with these things. I can’t see why a reader should either.

[Stephanie Sun · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should have loved this, but I didn't. Ambling and bougie, these poems leave one begging for a really garish rhyme or two or thirty, anything to disrupt the feeling of being stuck inside a Getty Images stock photo with a man whose favorite food is bread.

"Gracias." "De nada."

Hass titles his book Time and Materials, but can't seem to muster up any strong feeling about the inadequacy, mystery, beauty, or sinisterness of either. Women laugh at him, and can live without him, and that's all okay too.

With poetry, we want the language to feel both surprising and inevitable. In this book, rarely do we find both at once. The striking moments appear at random - they are neither built up to nor do they change the tenor of the parent poem. They're just there. Conversely, when Hass shows any sign of intent, it's extremely literal. I mean, he titled his poem about Bush's war, "Bush's War," and his poem about climate change, "State of the Planet."

If a sweet sixth grader did such things, we would secretly smile at his naïveté.

"And what good is indignation to the dead?"

-
* Both images from gettyimages.com.

[Charlotte Pence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection by Hass is one of the most inspiring books I've read in a while. (Inspiring in terms of showing me new ways to construct a poem.) The poems feature a structure that no one else quite does, but I have noticed more poets attempting. It’s a type of poem I’m not sure what to call. Some of its features are a sprawling, Whitman-like open-armed line, quick and strong rapid-fire associations, nose-punched images, list-like details, somewhat opaque transitions for the reader to sense either sonically, intellectually, or emotionally. Granted, I love sweeping movements in a poem, but these movements are like a shot of Cuervo chased by Red Bull.

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Time & Materials: Poems 1997-2005 is Robert Hass's collection that shares with Philip Schultz's Failure the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I won't try to pass my comments off as criticism. For me, the collection as a whole was not particularly intriguing or moving. But poetry is so personal - I believe we are drawn to poetry in much the same way that we find ourselves attracted to other people. What I see in a person may be completely lost on someone else. More than other forms of literature, I believe that appreciation for a poem is a matter of taste and experience and emotional connection. I found Time & Materials to be good technically, but I felt little connection to the subject matter and thus was unable to appreciate this work as perhaps another reader would.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice range in this book: teeny tiny poems, very long single-stanza things, series, confessional narratives, political poems. It seems like Hass uses nature as a way out, sometimes. Like, the poem will be in the middle of an intense, sticky conflict, and he'll up and end it with, like, "Oh, we'll all die some day anyway and turn into trees." But this only happens sometimes. Most of the time the poems seem very whole.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

i *really* loved this. all of it. i loved the imitations, the personal moments, the war poems, the observations, the sounds. these are, i think, the first contemporary american war poems that i have actually loved. i've read a few that i enjoyed, certainly, but these were really moving. the lines tend to not be punchy and perfect individually - the effects are cumulative and layered.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. I will review later.

[Ian Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 Some good, some that I didn't really connect to. Summer Snow really is the gem of his collections for me.

[Sophia Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

My overwhelming impression is that Hass is a consummate poet who can write pretty much anything he wants. Indeed, this volume of poems covers almost every form on pretty much any subject you care to name. And the scope of his learning is immense as demonstrated by ‘State of the Planet' (On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory).

His mood varies: he can be playful as in 'I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri', whilst at the same time intimate. Further, 'Drift and Vapour (Surf Faintly)' manages to be honest as well as wry. His flair for dark humour is very attractive!

He has the enviable ability to take a thing and run with it. He gives the impression that it's very easy to observe something as simple as the image of a "cardinal’s sudden smudge of red/In the bed grey winter words" and to then go on to write about the problem of describing the colour red. Needless to say he manages to do just this in 'The Problem of Describing Color' and much, much more.

Another 'problem' poem attempts to describe trees. Ironically – perhaps because he won't/can't (!) – He tells us that "there are limits to saying,/in language, what the tree did." Further, that "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us."

It's almost impossible to select a favourite poem. I particularly enjoyed the sequence 'Breach and Orison’, and 'After the Winds'. The latter poem contains this very poignant and all too human observation about Easter morning, which surely is a metaphor for all relationships that have ended, no matter what the reason.

For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn't mean
She'd got him back. It meant she'd lost him in another way.
It was a voice she loved, the body, not the god

But if I had to choose just one, I think it must be 'Art and Life', if only because every time I read it I find something else. With consummate skill Hass marries observations about a work of art, its composition, Vermeer's immediate world; and the people eating lunch in the employee’s cafeteria who may, or may not, have been engaged in a relationship with 'The Milkmaid'. Plus - as if this isn't enough - he even weaves in details of what reads like a contemporary one night stand.

Highly recommended!

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

On second reading, this collection opened up to me as a meditation on the uncertainty or “problems” of words, of description, of this thing called poetry in the face of history and atrocity.

After his powerful “problem” poems (“The Problem of Describing Color” and “The Problem of Describing Trees”), the next poem, “Winged and Acid Dark,” inspired by the film A Woman in Berlin, interrupts the terrible story about a female prostitute in WWII for us to know as he does, of Basho’s admonition on poetry: “Basho told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials. / If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it / and no one to say it to. / I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied / swarming of insects near waterfall.” And then he continues to narrate the horrible story, referencing Goethe afterward, “we are what we can imagine.” Despite the ugliness and “horror” of this story, there’s a resilience, a decision that this isn’t the full “truth of the world” that I find hopeful, moving, and earned throughout this collection.

The next poem in the sequence furthers this underlying—at times jocular—humanity. Hass does give us Basho’s “swarm” but in the form of time: “A Swarm Of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noons.” Instead of what a poem should be about, this poem takes up the issue/process of composing a poem, juxtaposing “the Book of Errors” with the “Book of Luck.” Here as elsewhere Hass is playful. Even as he adumbrates the horrors, even as he warily tries to bear witness to atrocious facts, the monk who drank “a bit of raisin wine at vespers” is still close by.

It’s a hard, risky line to walk between the, on the one hand, bawdy, playful, and vibrant tones and the, on the other hand, fragile, horrified, outraged ones. So I applaud Hass for such range and ambition. These protest poems that turn into wary, but resilient ars poeticas (and vice versa) are less didactic and more searching than they might have been in the hands of a less seasoned poet.

All this said, I did have a sense that I might enjoy these poems even more later on in my life. Despite the mastery of these poems, I want a little more surprise and strangeness: loose change.

[Scott Edward Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I studied with Robert Hass and learned a lot from him as a teacher. But I learned more, perhaps, from the way he perceives nature and people in his poems. I enjoy falling into a Hass poem, which is what you do...it's not a straight reading experience.

The nature part is easy. Bob has a gift for observation and detail (not unlike Elizabeth Bishop's, in my view). But getting people right in poems is a lot harder.

There's usually a dialogue and plenty of interior thinking, analyzing, self-analyzing. Almost I want to say, like in a Woody Allen film from the late 70s. There is usually a male character and a female. One assumes the former is modeled on the author, but it's hard to tell.

It's autobiography without being solipsistic. Because Hass has almost a novelist's knack for getting into each of his characters, as if there is much of him in each of them or at least he understands them.

Wonderful to have a new book from Bob, because they are so rare. And this is some of his finest work yet. He's never been a poet who gets stuck in a groove for too long, and he continues to challenge himself in this new collection.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

More poetry before bed...

Meh. These were not great. Hass employs a lot of nature imagery into his poems, but none of it really grabbed me the way the good poetry I've been reading has. (Or even the bad poetry, which usually has something that makes me stop and think.) I didn't actively dislike them, but the poems didn't hold my attention, and upon finishing I couldn't always remember what the poem had been about. The people in them felt inauthentic, and the writing never fully convinced me any of them were real. This was especially true when he was writing about women or girls, but looking back it applied to many of the male characters too, making the poems flat. The choice of the book to end with several anti-war poems in a row was interesting, but I hadn't been paying close enough attention to see if the whole book had been leading up to that.

This review sounds much more negative than I felt about the book. Mostly, it was fine, but it never really caught my interest, and by the end it felt like I had to push myself to finish it.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe this one suffered because I've read some very strong collections lately. Still, this book won an "award." I realize that Hass went "political" with some of the poems, and maybe that had something to do with his winning the award -- that and his name recognition. Whatever. "Political" poems are often bad poems, but "Bush's War" (the most obvious political poem in this collection) isn't a bad poem. Whether it has legs years from now in anything other than anti-war anthologies, is another question. Then again, there's "A Poem," which is about Vietnam, etc. It isn't a poem (and I'm very flexible on that). In fact, a number of the poems in this collection struck me as tinkered-with journal entries. In the end, I just felt this was a pale and bloodless effort (even with all the (late) middle-aged crazy preoccupation with sex), and one that will have me questioning "award winning" collections in the future.

[Shedim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Hass is a fearless modern poet, and by that I mean he is not afraid of the 21st Century: it's words, it's culture, it's religion. Math, science, evolution, medicine, politics... These are not novelties of the world for Hass; they are the knit fabric of our lives. In fits funny, honest, obtuse, open, nostalgic, optimistic, complex, simple, profound - but never flippant: the poet's voice never waivers in its sober exhale. There's a density to many of the poems, in an academic sense - or in the sense of requiring study to fully enjoy, which may be off-putting to people who enjoy more direct narratives and emotional verse. But there's plenty for every palate in this offering.

[Liz Shine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved, loved, loved this book! Took my time and read each poem multiple times. I could never read another poetry book and be satisfied to have stopped here. That won't happen, but it could. This book is that good in craft and substance. The poems in this collection stirred my mind and heart, filled my with sadness, delight, and curiosity. You should definitely read it. Thank you, Mr. Hass, for your lovely poems.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection by a well-respected poet who has an audience. I remember reading "Bush's War" in The American Poetry Review. It's didactic, but it's poetry. I like the short pieces best.

IOWA, JANUARY

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection. I liked all the West Coast references, family life, art & literature, & I especially liked his new war poems. There should be a special award for beautiful poetry covers, this one would certanly win it!

[AB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr. Hass! Needs more blackberry!

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't love every single one of these poems, but the ones I did love I really loved.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Multi-award winner, critic, Professor of English at Berkeley, translator of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and himself US Poet Laureate between 1995-97, Robert Hass is one of the most lauded of contemporary American poets. And yet he seems to be little known in the UK. As far as I understand, unlike, say, John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, August Kleinzahler and Mary Oliver among others, Hass has never had a UK publisher (unless you count his contribution to Five American Poets from Carcanet in 1979). This is somewhat remiss, to say the least, as Rober Hass is quite simply one of the best poets writing in English today and his work demands to be better known this side of the pond. (Digression: interestingly, Robert Hass is almost the opposite to American poet Frederick Seidel published by Faber who is better known here than in his own back yard, or perhaps more it is more apposite to say ‘roof terrace’. The contrasts poetically between Hass and 'laureate of the louche' Seidel are, however, truly Atlantic!)

Born in San Francisco in 1941, Hass's poetry career began in 1973 when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award with Field Guide. Drawing for inspiration on the Californian countryside and his background in Eastern European studies, it established his reputation immediately. This was enhanced further in his next collection, Praise, which won the William Carlos Willians award in 1979 and, according to Robert Miklitsch, marked "the emergence of a major American poet".

In 1984 Hass published, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, a collection of essays and reviews exploring American stallwarts such as Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley and James Wright as well as European and Japanese poets (including Milosz, Transtromer and Rilke). The collection won him a National Book Critics Circle award though it incurred the wrath of Helen Vendler who, in an article for The New York Review of Books, found its social, informal and seductive style ('Californian manner') so stylised as to be 'unsettling' and Hass's criticism 'interesting, learned, and deft' while at the same time 'sentimental'. (Digression: Vendler asks some pretty fundamental questions in this article about the nature of criticism, the 'subject' of poetry and the uncertainty of audience which is still pertinent today. See, for instance, Magma Poetry online's discussion about the purpose of poetry reviews and blogs such as this one. )

Hass's third collection of poetry, Human Wishes, came out in 1990 again to critical acclaim. Japanese poetry had always been an important influence and in 1995 he published The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His translations pays tribute to a linguistic clarity and an 'aesthetic ideal' that informs Hass' own poetry:
in which one could use language as a clear mirror of the seeing of the world, which of course only happens through work. You don't get to see that way if your head is full of brainless chatter... At some level the common world has to be earned over and over again.
Another collection of poetry, Sun under Wood, appeared in 1996 to relatively mixed reviews but nevertheless garnered Hass another National Book Critics Circle award.

Hass's latest collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997 - 2005, and his first for 11 years was published in 2007 by Ecco Press (and available in UK bookshops). It won Hass further critical acclaim as well as another clutch of prizes including the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. It is a virtuoso performance and covers typical Hassian themes: the nature of art, the natural world and what humans are doing to it, the nature of desire and the erotic, the violence of history and histories of violence. There are the familiar North Californian landscapes as well as visits to and visions of Berlin, the DMZ between the Koreas, Mexico and Paris. Tributes are paid to poets and painters: Gerhard Richter, Vermeer, Milosz, Transtromer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, Trakl, Goethe and Lucretius. Stylistically, the collection ranges from the short haiku-like clarity of 'Three Dawn Songs in Summer':
The first long shadows in the fields
Are like mortal difficulty.
The first birdsong is not like that at all.
to longer blank verse narratives, from the intimate exchanges of lovers in 'Then Time' and the long Lucretius-inspired eco-poem 'State of the Planet' to the violence and dignified, almost detached, rage of 'A Poem' and 'Bush's War':
The young arab depiliated himself as an act
Of purification before he drove the plane
Into the office building. It's not just
The violence, it's a taste for power
That amounts to contempt for the body.
Although not the best poem in the collection, it nevertheless demonstrates clarity and formal skill: how Hass' very matter-of-fact statements turn around carefully worked enjambements so that the final stress of the sound works the eye as well as the sound so that abstract nouns and concepts are infused with the personal and concrete : act/plane, power/body. These are very public poems imbued with a subtle moral force and touched with tenderness and clarity that is almost the opposite of the grave bombastic persona of one of Hass's great influences: Robert Lowell.

In his earlier essay 'Lowell's Graveyard' Hass makes the distinction between history and nostalgia:
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly. History is the antidote to this.
Nostalgia is lost in its own hermetically-sealed past, history (in poetry at least) should be open, dialectical, dialogic, it should induce a gap between the actual and the possible, providing a 'vision of an alternative world'. This vision is the product of the poetic imagination; and it was Hass' great revelation through reading Lowell's 'The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket' poem that history was not so much a place in time 'but a place in imagination' (my emphasis). This Romantic-Modernist faith in imagination is central to Hass' poetic and political creed (note: his well-known mantra is 'capitalism makes networks, imagination makes communities') and as the 'Time' part of the collection's title suggests, it is one of the main threads weaving its way through this latest collection.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Stephen Burt has said:
Hass's title doubles as a warning about his own book: poets who become public figures may lose both the hours (time) in which to write their poems and the introspective energies (materials) that inspire them.
This is only partially true and it doesn't really do the collection justice. Yes, there are themes of thwarted hopes and outbursts of frustration but all this is part of Hass's exploration into the limits (or at least his limits) of effective artistic utterance. Time and Materials is an enquiry into the meaning of time in poetry - both personal and historical - as well as the limits of the poetical material to hand i.e. language on the page. Gerhard Richter becomes an analagous and exemplary figure here as a painter who has veered from photorealism to severe abstraction.
The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words,
And their disposition on the page.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and Hass's 'post-modernist' - and often humorous - self-reflexive interpolation is one particularly effective weapon in his rhetorical arsenal. In light vein, 'After The Winds' begins:
My friend's older sister's third husband's daughter -
That's about as long as a line of verse should get -
Karmic debris? A field anthropologist's kinship map?
Just sailed by me on the Berkeley street
This interpolative strategy is especially effective in 'I Am Your Waiter Tonight And My Name Is Dimitri'. Inspired by a poem by John Ashbery, Hass inhabits Ashbery's conceit and makes the poem a family saga of immigrant America via Dostoyevsky and US intervention in war. It sounds clever-clever, high-minded and potentially boorish. It's certainly clever, high-minded with a certain demotic imperative, but it is never dull or pretentious and Hass is a master of concision and narrative drive.
Grushenka got two boys out of her body,
One was born in 1894, the other in 1896,
The elder having dies in the mud at the Battle of the Somme
From a piece of shrapnel manufactured by Alfred Nobel.
Metal traveling at that speed works amazing transformations
On the tissues of the human intestine; the other son worked construction
The year his mother died.
A few lines later we get an extraordinary 14 line paraphrase of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment after which we find this:
I frankly admit the syntax
of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands
of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds
at the Somme, has escaped my grip. I step over it
gingerly. Where were we?
This is, of course, Hass playing Eliot but his 'periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion' functions here, as in other places in this collection, to break up - syntactically - the poetic 'enchantment' of the musical line; it's a way to alienate a nostalgic reading of the poem so that it snaps the reader back into an ironising present thereby giving the reader some kind of critical distance. It's that 'making strange' advocated by the Russian Formalists and exemplified in Brecht. Hass himself has said, in relation to the Formalist critic Eichenbaum:
the function of art is to make the grass grass and the stone stone by freeing us from the automatism of human perception
Hass's interpolations and digressions work as a delimiter to the power of poetic expression while the crafty humour at the same time undercuts and heightens the horrors of a potentially overbearing historical reality (e.g. comparing sloppy syntax to 'slithering' intestines - and let's not forget the allusion to Yossarian's recurrent dream in Heller's Catch 22 thrown in for good measure); all this has the effect of acting as a counterweight to the gravitational pull of, what Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney calls, 'the actual'. Invoking Heaney here seems to me both appropriate and elucidating. Much of what Hass has says about facing history through the poetic imagination echoes Heaney's own preoccupations since The Government of the Tongue and is demonstrated with greatest force in his inaugural Oxford lecture, The Redress of Poetry, where, invoking, among others, Sir Philip Sidney, Wallace Stevens and Simone Weil Heaney stresses poetry's need to redress the balance against our own hostile and violent times, as he puts it: 'the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.'

In the same lecture Heaney (in an acute balancing act of his own) also says that poetry 'cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language...' And there is plenty of 'self-delighting inventiveness' in Time and Materials. In 'A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noons' there is an almost Muldoonian playfulness in the shifting of meanings of words through etymology and excrutiating puns:
Hay
Is the Old English word for strike. You strike down

Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown.
The upshot of Heaney's and Hass's position is that, yes poetry has its limits but one still has to go on redressing the balance as a moral imperative. Hass is best at is precisely pointing out those limits and yet still affirming the joy of the free lyric voice. In 'The Problem of Describing Trees' he writes:
The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
Hass has an unswerving faith in the imagination and his is a poetry that praises the world yet has that 'immense ballast' he admired so much in his friend Milsoz. He is a Romantic-Modernist with a weather-eye on post-modern scepticism. For post-modernists he may knit together far more than he unpicks but his is a balancing act that will suit many adroit readers. I will end with one of the finest poems in the collection, 'Envy of Other People's Poems':
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So, Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn't hear - plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds -
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.
Well almost the end.

Is Robert Hass the Great American Poet? Daft question really. Yes he is, along with Ashbery and Gluck and Pinsky and Doty and Baraka and [enter name in here]. There are many Americas and a poet to fit each one. Hass does embrace the Whitmanesque multitudes however: a West Coast poet who looks beyond the New England shores of Stevens and Lowell to the Eastern Europe of Brodsky, Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert; who looks toward the 'other' America of Neruda and East to the Kyoto of Basho. All this informs his attitude to and perception of his homeland and its landscape and people and history. The shame is why we can't have more of him over here.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

[...]

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

[...]
- The Problem of Describing Trees (pg. 10)

The so-called "limits in language" are, in fact, limits in the poet's imagination. First and foremost, how many poets have described trees before, how many times have trees been described in different and nuanced ways? All beautiful, I might add. Although language undeniably has its limits, it can't be said that language reaches its limits here, in this poem. Again, I refer to a limit in the poet's imagination, for another reason... The reason being that he could not find a more accurate example to demonstrate the limits of language. I refer to the poets who came before. If the poet really wanted to lament his inability to describe something (without exposing the limits of his imagination), perhaps he should have harked on the challenge of describing something that has been described so many time already. I wouldn't know what to say about a tree - not for limit of imagination, but because so many greater writers have described trees in greater ways than I could ever hope to. Which brings me to the poet's next shortcoming: Why attempt to describe something when you know you can't describe it (be it for any of the aforementioned reasons, of for the poet's proposed reason, the limits of language). Of course the poet is not describing the tree, but describing his inability to describe the tree. If this was the poet's intention all along, it leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from being an admission of the depravity of his anachronistic form of poetry (as if the previously line about the gene pool throwing up a "wobbly" stem is an example of the possibilities of language opposite the limits of language), it is an admission of guilt, of complacency, of sterility. If we, the reader, are to accept that the poem is not a meditation on a tree but a meditation on the problem of describing trees (as the title suggests), then we must also accept that the poet is aware of the depravity of his poetic form, aware of the anachronism...

The only line in the poem that resonates is "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us". This line summarizes my feelings on Time and Materials. At least the part about being disenchanted. I'm not sure about the part about it being good. Good for who?

I don't think it's good for the reader. Perhaps I'm only speaking for myself but... to feel disenchanted, and then to be told that "it is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant"... Firstly, this assumes that it is the poetry and not the poet that is to blame for disenchanting us. I don't accept this assumption, and would sooner blame the poet (be it Robert Hass or any other poet). Secondly, this assumes that the poet should decide how their poetry should affect the reading audience. I don't accept this assumption, and would rather decide for myself how poetry should affect me than leave it to the poet (especially a poet like Robert Hass, who has called his qualifications into question by failing to describe a tree).

I don't think it's good for the poet. Although he has succeeded in shifting the attention away from the tree he cannot describe, onto the act of describing the tree, he has failed to create a strong case for the so-called "limits in language". The reader cannot help but suspect that it is not the limits of language but the limits of the poet's imagination that prevent him from describing the tree. Likewise, the reader suspects that it is not poetry that has disenchanted us but the poet himself. Ultimately, the poet's "slight-of-hand" has failed. Informing us that "it is good sometimes for slight-of-hand to disenchant us" does not diminish the failure.

I'm sure I had something to say about the other poems in this collection. Unfortunately they have been overshadowed by the monumental failure that is Robert Hass's problem of describing trees... Not to mention his problem of crafting a poem around the problem of describing trees.

[Talbot Hook · Rating 3 out of 5]

As almost all poetry nowadays which falls into featureless blocks, I can't distinguish between mediocre, good, and excellent. Bad . . . you can always tell bad. But good? What does good look like for prose poems? For free verse? For randomly clipped
lines and thoughts bleeding
over into more
lines and more
thoughts? It's all like playing four-square but without the squares. And this isn't to say that you can't write lovely things in such a featureless way; there are plenty of lovely images, metaphors, and allusions in Time and Materials. There are some very beautiful things. But are they poetry? I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine. Seemingly, everything is now, from receipts to old lotto tickets. Poetry has come to encompass all forms of writing, and so it has given up any definition; it's just a vague word we have now to describe anything written. Got a confession? Turn it into a poem! View a bird today? Poem! Stomach cramps? Poem. There is more to it than that, of course, and Hass is intelligent enough to bolster his work with many thoughtful things. But, again, I have no idea how to tell if his poems are good or just mediocre. I've read poems like this from hundreds of poets, some unpublished, and some poet laureate. Someone must know, right?

The thing I appreciate about meter, form, and the like, is that I can tell when something is amiss, on-point, egregious, masterful, or wondrous. There are bounds, and so there can be some basis for judgment. For the random-text-blocks-with-random-spaces type of poetry, I'm just left with vague feelings: "I like this one," or "Oh, that's a lovely vision," or "God, what a tired metaphor." Does my feeling make the book? Does it decide the quality? It seems to be judge, jury, and executioner these days. And, don't get me wrong, there's certainly an element of such feelings in our affinity towards art, but that's not the whole picture, not even close.

Feelings =/= quality

Feelings + intellectual stimulation + linguistic thoughtfulness (e.g., assonance) + clever concept + beautiful metaphor + X + Y + Z + (other aspects to ∞) = quality

In the end: I guess I sort of liked it?

[Travel Writing · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is the season of lulls..."

I love Robert Hass' work. For a title like Time and Materials, I wanted to be catapulted by Hass' words, his depth and range and ability to transport. Instead, finishing this book feels like I took a one-block bus ride on a sunny day. A season of lulls, in which I am not sure what I was doing, or why...

Look, the poems were quite lovely. Like warm milk and a hug. One poem, one hit me and I can't stop thinking about it...this is the kind of poem I was expecting throughout:

Ezra Pound’s Proposition

beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-La Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled

In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
by Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Drancisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read earlier efforts by the estimable Mr. Hass, I was prepared to be consumed by an admixture of awe, envy, and wonder, and I was not disappointed. For in "Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005" the author has created a new and wonderful poetic world for the reader to inhabit, a world that has hints of past forays into the world created by past poems, but which is new and vivid, like the dawn on a clear Bay Area summer day. These poems are filled with the touches, subtle and light, that distinguish Mr. Hass' work from lesser poets; additionally, the details of the Sierra Nevada, the references to other poets (Ezra Pound), the humane anti-war idealism (didactic, but not terribly so) all make for a poetic experience that is similar to brushing your cheek against the belly of a particularly soft, compliant kitten: lovely beyond measure. And the combining of syntax, diction, cadence, and rhythm are pitch perfect, making for peaks of sublime artistic experience which justify the often cruel vagaries of this fallen world we live in. If one wishes to experience poetry at its best, if one wishes to gain snippets of wisdom that will expand the soul, if one wishes to be soothed by the music of words (so soft, so lovely), then this brief tome is the best introduction for the enlightenment-bound reader. Fine stuff!

[Anthony Immergluck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection. I fought with myself about whether to give it 4 or 5 stars, because I felt it had some frustrating misses among the hits. But the hits, for me, were truly special. And the whole book feels like a desperate and focused mission to wring every last drop of poetry from the world.

There's a lot of stylistic variety here, but I think it could be chunked loosely into three parts. The first third is heavy on Wallace Stevens-style meditations, the middle third focuses largely on the arts, and the last third focuses on war and documentary poetry. The most obvious outlier is "State of the Planet," an enormous suite about our pending ecological armageddon. I've read "State of the Planet" before, on its own, and I think it's one of the best poems I've ever encountered on the topic.

Despite the wide range of approaches and subject matter, there's a running theme throughout. Hass wants to know how, why, and if we should find beauty in horrible things. How do we reconcile our desires to write a poem, paint a painting, or kiss a partner with the horrors of the world? This book was written during the Bush era, but it's a good fit for 2022. Things have not, I'm sorry to say, gotten better.

"Time and Materials" is also chock-full of great food poetry, interestingly enough. There's one I really like about cucumbers.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And dreams, well, dreams / Will have their way with you, their way / With you, will have their way" (First Things at the Last Minute, 76).

3.5 stars. Hass explores the esoteric and the erotic. I have to admit that "Etymology" is a gem of a poem that gets better and better. And it uses an Anglo-Saxon word, so that's fun.

This image really pierced me through: "Was crying and thinking alternately / Like someone falling down and getting up / And running and falling and getting up... / The object of this poem is not to annihila / To not annih / The object of this poem is to report a theft, / In progress, of everything" (Time and Materials, 24).

I think perhaps Hass' outlook/tone was sometimes too calloused for my taste. I guess maybe I'm an optimist after all: I like liking things and live to love, despite the cost. The magic is not lost on me yet.

"I loved you first, I think, / When you stood in the kitchen sunlight and the lazy motes / Of summer dust while I sliced a nectarine" (A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noons, 12).

This is a book read in the intermission of a Czech opera and in the park during lunch breaks at work.

#sealeychallenge2022

[Molly Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the poems in this book are among the longest I have read in my limited (but growing!) exposure to poetry. At first I struggled to digest these longer narrative poems, but after working through them I came to appreciate their scope and heft. When Hass writes an 8-page poem, he gives himself room to develop characters, wander away from them, and then return to the story bearing an overarching theme to tie it all together. I especially enjoyed “State of the Planet” for such a journey. Some of Hass’s more intellectual poems reference pretty obscure pieces of art or literature, such as the Baltic folk tale heavily referenced in “Tomas Tranströmer: Song”. I found these poems harder to connect with, as I felt like I was missing crucial background information to fully understand them. But some poems I didn’t like on first reading grew on me and, on a second reading, became some of my favorites. Reading this collection introduced me to a new way of thinking about character and narration in poetry, especially the way Hass uses an authorial “I” in his longer narrative poems.

[Janet O Lowe]

Of course, poetry is not typically plowed through, but this time I did. Many of Hass' poems referenced things that seemed to be out of reach to everyone but the subject of the poems. They started out a little odd, but then began to be pulling the reader more into ancient texts of greek and roman mythology.... Eventually commenting on the Vietnam War, violence against women, war, and the violence in WWII. At the end, some were more essay than poem. "A Poem" quote I especially liked "In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century, 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians...." You would think we should reflect on that. Most of his poems seem to require context and, out of context, are not interesting. Miscellaneous, tumbled thoughts that meander of some hidden and some unhidden topics. I don't know why this received a Pulitzer Prize. The recent national poet's poems (ref: Biden's inauguration) are better written and more interesting to me.

[Wayne Low · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great poems with some misses. Certainly lives up to the title, and is rather thematically strong, especially in the grand sense of time’s passage being evoked and discussed.

Loved the fast and quick cuts between scenes of antiquity, nature and imagery that arrests as much as it gives way for contemplation.

This is my first book by Robert Hass, and I think I admire the control he has over his poems, especially over his narrative sweeps.

Only a few things: I didn’t really care for much of the politics, especially his eco poems. I thought they were empty I feel that his attitudes on the matter are already evident in the way he treats his natural imagery with such reverence. I guess I would also have liked the poems to cut deeper, or aim to be a little tighter; probably is my fault but I felt sometimes lost in the side roads the narrative took.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry. Sometimes, sometimes, you have to go out on a limb. I am taking an online class through my alma mater called "Living Writers" and this year one of the books is by Robert Haas. I loved it from the first poem. Just two lines. Amazing. Perfect.

If you don't read poetry either, read this. My favorites so far? "Iowa, January," "Poem with a Cucumber In It," "I am Your Waiter Tonight And My Name Is Dmitri,""Art and Life," and "Time and Materials."

There are poems that are totally over my head. I've got to do some research to figure them out. I think I could get it. You could too.

Read poetry. It's entertaining, it's edifying, it's mind expanding.