Field Guide.

by Robert Hass

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This first collection by former Laureate and Pulitzer winner Robert Haas may be even better than I think it is. After all, Haas can communicate the “thereness” of the California coast better than anyone except Jeffers and Snyder, he can summon the reality of the everyday world through a conjurer's mastery of concrete nouns, and he uses these abilities to fashion an array of still lives and miniature landscapes which quietly assert their power and do not apologize for what they are. Still, I prefer a personal voice and human beings in my poetry, and, although people can be glimpsed at the margins of these still lives and landscapes, they never quite show their faces, and I get the feeling this is because the poet's voice is too cautious, too concerned with formal achievement to fully commit itself.

“Coast,” the first of the book's three sections, is the one most uniformly excellent, showing Haas' West Coast and his marvelous nouns to best advantage. The middle section “A Pencil” deals principally with literary matters, and although there are important personal poems here (witness “The Return of Robinson Jeffers”), I believe this section is the weakest, certainly too academic for my taste. In the last section, “In Weather,” Haas readjusts his vision of the landscape to his new home in Buffalo, New York (he sees his environment now as “the weather” or “the house"—the atmospheres or spaces in which we move), and begins to express his personal and political self with greater clarity and richness. “In Weather” is not as perfect as “Coasts,” but it is deeper, and promises greater things.

The following poem is from “In Weather.” I like the way Haas reveals himself here, both as a husband and as a frightened young California boy.

HOUSE

Quick in the April hedge
were juncos and kinglets.
I was at the window
just now, the bacon
sizzled under hand,
the coffee steamed
fragrantly & fountains
of the Water Music
issued from another room.
Living in a house
we live in the body
of our lives, last night
the odd after-dinner light
of early spring & now
the sunlight warming or
shadowing the morning rooms.

I am conscious of being
myself the inhabitant
of certain premises:
coffee & bacon & Handel
& upstairs asleep my wife.
Very suddenly
old dusks break over me,
the thick shagged heads
of fig trees near the fence
& not wanting to go in
& swallows looping
on the darkened hill
& all that terror
in the house
& barely, only barely,
a softball
falling toward me
like a moon.

[Kate Steilen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naming as poetry. A friend or two gave this to me and my husband after we moved to california, and we went on a trip with them, in the West, and they observed that we had become overly preoccupied, even ecstatic, with the naming of things, namely raptors, or hawks, and egrets and herons, and all the wild looking plants that appear in the West, crazy, over-scented flora, to the non-western eye. This book is the perfect companion to that obsession, of course it got there first. From "Letter" : "You even have my field guide. It's you I love. I have believed so long in the magic of names and poems. I hadn't thought them bodiless at all. Tall Buttercup. Wild Vetch. 'Often I am permitted to return to the meadow.' It all seemed real to me last week. Words. You are the body of my world, root and flower, the brightness and surprise of birds. I miss you, love. Tell Leif you're the names of things."

Surely poetry doesn't get any better than that....

[Loren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book probably saved my life a couple of times when I badly needed to step out of myself and experience someone else's life in extreme and vivid particular... something I think is more possible with poetry than other mediums. The poems are about him and his wife going to the movies, shopping for used books, and hoping they don't die after eating mushrooms they picked in the wild as well as other poets, history, nature... but mostly they're a calm, no-bullshit assurance that we're all in this life business together. My favorite is called "Letter to a Poet" and the last few lines are:

"What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind

we survive on. It isn't much.
You are 4,ooo miles away &
this world did not invite us."

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Hass is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and this is his first book of poetry. As a poet Hass is mostly an autodidact, and he learned the art of poetry long before the poetry workshops became popular. This results in much freshness and variety of the forms that his poems take. And yet even in these early poems one can sense a lot of maturity and self-assurance in the use of language that oftentimes come with many years of experience. He is confident enough to be able to use even the simplest language in his poems in order to convey complex and nonobvious images.

The landscape that Robert Hass provides us with is primarily the landscape of California. It is the landscape of a magnificent coast, but it's also a landscape of its people and thoughts. Hass is a keen observer of the human nature in its habitat, and he reports it sometimes with its raw nakedness, even if this verges on provocative and vulgar.

The poems in this collection vary in style and length, from three-line haikus, to more prose-like poems that span several pages. All of them, however, bear Hass' unique signature and style. They are a refreshing read and highly enjoyable for every lover of poetry.

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed most of the poems in this collection. There is a strange mix of natural imagery juxtaposed with social/political commentary. It shifts among beauty, eroticism and the disturbing, perhaps being so close to the natural world, even the title “Field Guide” presents the idea that it is a reference for the wild, we see that people aren’t so removed from our animal counterparts. Maybe the trouble lies in ignoring that on some level we are made up of animal instincts, it’s an idea that is problematic for a lot of people who think that reason alone makes us superior. Hass seems to write from that division of man and animal using our wars, pettiness and double standards against us.

[Charleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Field Guide is Robert Hass' first volume. An experimental assortment of poetry that uses images of the California landscape, as well as images of everyday life, as a form of meditation. Interesting poems, thought provoking and strangely positive. The poems also explore many forms and through them Hass is looking for his voice.

[Tracy O · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite Robert Hass book. It's beautiful and Robert Hass doesn't take himself too seriously. If having a wonderful, Indian summer day in Berkeley were a book, it would be this one.

[atito · Rating 2 out of 5]

some poems really good, some poems atrocious. always a wild time, reading men.

[sheereen · Rating 4 out of 5]

exactly what i have been looking for. my favorite poems were maps; house; in weather; and letter to a poet.

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores. You
asked mildly, "Bob, who is Ugo Betti?"
A bearded bird-like man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Ugo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. Dusk was
a huge weird phosphorescent beast
dying slowly out across the bay.
Our house waited and our books,
the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.
After dinner I read one anyway.
You chanted, "Ugo Betti has no bones,"
and when I said, "The limits of my language
are the limits of my world" you laughed.
We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth."

[Gary McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, he's like a fine wine.

[nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an incredible book of poetry. wow. that's all i have to say.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice book of poems, many of them set in the San Francisco Bay Area. He's really good at evoking a place and the loneliness and longing of the human spirit in these places.

[Jacob Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hass early on in his career and really in a lot of ways at his best.

[whimsicalmeerkat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I adore Robert Hass' poetry.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkably clear-eyed and deliberate walk through Northern-ish California, adeptly hiding it's political fervor for its climax.

[Cindy Cunningham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found much of the book quite lovely. He knows how to bring it home at the end!

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, surprising first collection by one of my favorite poets.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

magnificent

[Andrew Kubasek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry blew me away. Just beautiful. I found myself reading and then re-reading poems out loud. Not just a great first book, but a great book, period.

[Holly Fortune · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Hass addresses this muddied life.

[boocia]

okay quick review before bed ! i liked this a lot, i think, but definitely super over my head in a very concrete way; lots of literary and historical references even with google on hand i failed to track well.

i was impressed by how political these poems were, while also being v pastoral; i am curious about this performance in that it feels not political in radicalizing-the-reader, but more political in that being political is just part of being a person in society and therefore worthy of exploration and description in a poem because poems are about capturing experiences. it's a really neat joining; hass seems to really love california while also being very aware of california itself being conquered and stolen land; this awareness of colonialism then extending to a contemporary awareness of the vietnam war; in general i was impressed that he could hold love for animals and hills etc while still convincingly extending grief and anger about how they came to be. the anger and viscera and horror if "the failure of buffalo to levitate" and "the return of robinson jeffers" absolutely rocked, i didn't know poetry could be acidic in that way.

i am always looking for techniques to understand or crib off of; i think in this case it was nice to see how he states a fact in 'plain speech' and then brings it back by doing some really fluttery pretty descriptive abstraction-pointing stuff. it seems a nice trick for 'getting there' without losing momentum; a good way to sneak in just a historical factoid to set up some grander feeling.

anyway that was an insane para; his love poetry is very good and i am a sucker for how much this guy loves his wife. i don't think i've read poetry where the poet's wife is just 'my wife', mentioned very often, not a 'lover' or a 'woman'; i didn't realize how unabstracted and of-this-earth 'wife' is as a concept, but i loved his use of wife specifically. just his wife, super matter of fact, as inevitable as the ocean and the crabs etc. also great food descriptions, always a sucker for that.

yeah fun find !

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the laws
that bind us to the past
the names of things are
stubbornest


Re-reading this book (first published in 1973) so many years later, and in light of all that Hass has done since...it is remarkable how consistent and self-assured his voice has been from the very beginning. Self-assurance is different from arrogance. In this debut, Hass does very little fumbling around to find his purchase: his poetic focus (cataloging nature, exploring domesticity, philosophical musings, politics and geography, etc.) are all woven together with his now typical meditative skill.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because, years ago, I read a Robert Hass poem that really stuck with me, struck me as beautiful, and it came from this collection of his work. Having now read it, I can say that I somehow happened on the only poem that meant anything to me out of the whole collection, which, on the whole, favored strange natural landscapes, often with strange sexual imagery that were either obvious or hinted at. The majority of the poems were so completely surreal that they fell into my least favorite type of poetry, and that is the kind that is too abstract for me to enjoy. Sorry Robert Hass, but you're not my kind of poet. "Letter" was the only poem worth reading, after all.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great first book.

Here are the poems I dogeared:

"Spring"
"Graveyard at Bolinas"
"The Failure of Buffalo to Levitate" (that title!)
"Assassin"
"In Weather" (section 2; it has 7)

The book's second section is not its best, but I loved the first and third sections.

[Brianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Hass is the master of naming a thing. If you love are poetica, you will love Robert Hass. He has such a beautiful way of writing about the joys, the sorrows, the complications of writing. Hass has a wonderful way of writing about small moments of life. He is a poet for any kind of reader.

[Jo Fletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - Some beautiful poems, some that I...did not care for (chiefly, that strange part of "In Weather" where he tries to put himself in the shoes of a man who hates a woman so much, he tortures and kills her...is that really a necessary or useful exercise???).

[Adina · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are amazingly present, sensitive to time and place and sensation. At the same time, they are enmeshed in a wider world of political and social observations. Reading this collection makes me want to write poetry again.

[Seth the Zest · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely read. I intended to read only a small part last night but I read almost the whole thing in one sitting. The language had a delightful, musical quality to it and such images! I'm amazed Hass managed this book as a young man.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have been a 5 but for the lines "the cold comfort of a clitoral orgasm."