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Summer Snow: New Poems – A Major Poetry Collection Exploring Loss, Desire, and Nature from the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Robert Hass
A major collection of entirely new poems from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials and The Apple Trees at Olema
A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.
A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.
197 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 7, 2020
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996 people want to read
About the author
Robert Hass
120 books224 followersRobert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
March 17, 2021
Robert Hass would like us to know that he still thinks a lot about sex and poets in general and birds in his yard. I like him. Not his strongest collection, in my opinion, but I am always happy to hear what he has to say.
March 17, 2021
What the Modernists Wrote About: An Informal Survey
Hart Crane wrote about a bridge, and gulls in the dawn light,
And a subway tunnel, trains plowing through it in the ratcheting dark,
And the hobo camps along the railroad tracks in Indiana
And the flower of a sailor’s sex flowering
And the sweet terror of vertical longing in the horse latitudes.
And Thomas Stearns Eliot, poor Tom, as his friends said,
With his brilliance and his prim, squeamish Southern childhood
Channeled Baudelaire and wrote a poem
About sexual hunger and crippling self-consciousness
That made him very famous and refocused European poetry for several generations
And then, after his mentor
Bertrand Russell had slept with his—Eliot’s—distraught wife,
He wrote a poem—“Mr. Appollinax”—about a philosophical satyr
And then a poem about a broken world and the terrible power
Of spring, numbness after a brutal war, and the bodies
Of working class girls washed up in the Thames
And the boredom and hysteria in the boudoirs of the well-off,
And the memory of a riverside church—some old idea of “inexplicable splendor”—
And his desire to die to his sensual life
And later the memory of the laughter of children in a garden
On a path that seemed to lead somewhere indistinct
And probably irrecoverable
And later again the bombs that fell like tongues of flame on London.
Ezra Pound wrote about a number of subjects, as I recall,
Medieval Italian banking and the Paris Metro,
Among them. Also Chinese history
And being imprisoned in a cage,
And the mob that strung his hero Mussolini from a lamppost in Milan,
And when he was younger his first taste of Venice
While he sat on the Dogana’s steps,
And he wrote about a woman he remembered—“As cool as the pale, wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley”—
Who lay beside him in the dawn.
And Hilda Doolittle saw the Egyptian god Amon
In the green fields of Pennsylvania where he shone
Like the angels she needed to summon to survive the way the violence
Of the devastation of the bombed out city had shaken her and the way,
As a girl, desire had shaken her, and the rhythms of Sappho.
Robinson Jeffers wrote about the Big Sur headlands
And the hawk’s beak, and the tidal surges of the sea, and pelicans cruising
Like laden bombers down the coast near Point Pinos.
And Marianne Moore wrote the greatest poem
About a mountain in the twentieth century and called it “An Octopus.”
After that, or simultaneously, she wrote a poem about marriage,
The avoidance thereof. And the pangolin and the chambered nautilus
And the exacting work of a steeple jack
In a seaside town where a certain precision of craft
Was a matter of life and death.
And Bill Williams,
As his friends called the doctor, except Ezra Pound who called him
Ole Doc Williams, even when they were young,
Wrote about noticing a thirteen year old girl at the curb
On a street corner waiting for the light to change
And glancing down self-consciously at her new breasts,
A quite different take on the subject from Eliot’s,
And a girl cutting her little brother’s hair by a window
On a summer afternoon in a neighborhood of brick tenements.
And Brueghel, and wild onions, he wrote about, and the way cities burned
Like Christmas greens in the fireplace as the world war churned on.
And about how the coming of spring to a bare winter field
In New Jersey resembled the violence of child birth
And how he was disgusted with himself for being sexually attracted
To the half-witted girl who helped clean their house.
And Wallace Stevens wrote about the Connecticut River
And an early winter snowfall in Hartford
And the way sexual magic dissipated in his life
And what his Pennsylvania Dutch mother would think of his pretty
And explicitly atheist poems—
“Ach, mutter,” he wrote, “this old, black dress,
I have been embroidering French flowers on it”—
And the nature of imagination, and something
About the fact that you can regard blackbirds
From several points of view.
And Lola Ridge wrote about the New York ghetto
In something like the way Langston Hughes wrote about the Harlem streets
Because he perhaps took his manner at first from her
And from Carl Sandburg and, listening to the blues,
Made it his own when he described the rent parties
And the suicides and the grifters, the lovers, the numbers runners,
And the “boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred.”
And Mina Loy wrote about sex that was like pigs rooting,
Also, more fastidiously, the vowel sounds produced by a contemplation of the moon.
And Gertrude Stein. About was a writing. Outwardly. It was exceedingly about.
Hart Crane wrote about a bridge, and gulls in the dawn light,
And a subway tunnel, trains plowing through it in the ratcheting dark,
And the hobo camps along the railroad tracks in Indiana
And the flower of a sailor’s sex flowering
And the sweet terror of vertical longing in the horse latitudes.
And Thomas Stearns Eliot, poor Tom, as his friends said,
With his brilliance and his prim, squeamish Southern childhood
Channeled Baudelaire and wrote a poem
About sexual hunger and crippling self-consciousness
That made him very famous and refocused European poetry for several generations
And then, after his mentor
Bertrand Russell had slept with his—Eliot’s—distraught wife,
He wrote a poem—“Mr. Appollinax”—about a philosophical satyr
And then a poem about a broken world and the terrible power
Of spring, numbness after a brutal war, and the bodies
Of working class girls washed up in the Thames
And the boredom and hysteria in the boudoirs of the well-off,
And the memory of a riverside church—some old idea of “inexplicable splendor”—
And his desire to die to his sensual life
And later the memory of the laughter of children in a garden
On a path that seemed to lead somewhere indistinct
And probably irrecoverable
And later again the bombs that fell like tongues of flame on London.
Ezra Pound wrote about a number of subjects, as I recall,
Medieval Italian banking and the Paris Metro,
Among them. Also Chinese history
And being imprisoned in a cage,
And the mob that strung his hero Mussolini from a lamppost in Milan,
And when he was younger his first taste of Venice
While he sat on the Dogana’s steps,
And he wrote about a woman he remembered—“As cool as the pale, wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley”—
Who lay beside him in the dawn.
And Hilda Doolittle saw the Egyptian god Amon
In the green fields of Pennsylvania where he shone
Like the angels she needed to summon to survive the way the violence
Of the devastation of the bombed out city had shaken her and the way,
As a girl, desire had shaken her, and the rhythms of Sappho.
Robinson Jeffers wrote about the Big Sur headlands
And the hawk’s beak, and the tidal surges of the sea, and pelicans cruising
Like laden bombers down the coast near Point Pinos.
And Marianne Moore wrote the greatest poem
About a mountain in the twentieth century and called it “An Octopus.”
After that, or simultaneously, she wrote a poem about marriage,
The avoidance thereof. And the pangolin and the chambered nautilus
And the exacting work of a steeple jack
In a seaside town where a certain precision of craft
Was a matter of life and death.
And Bill Williams,
As his friends called the doctor, except Ezra Pound who called him
Ole Doc Williams, even when they were young,
Wrote about noticing a thirteen year old girl at the curb
On a street corner waiting for the light to change
And glancing down self-consciously at her new breasts,
A quite different take on the subject from Eliot’s,
And a girl cutting her little brother’s hair by a window
On a summer afternoon in a neighborhood of brick tenements.
And Brueghel, and wild onions, he wrote about, and the way cities burned
Like Christmas greens in the fireplace as the world war churned on.
And about how the coming of spring to a bare winter field
In New Jersey resembled the violence of child birth
And how he was disgusted with himself for being sexually attracted
To the half-witted girl who helped clean their house.
And Wallace Stevens wrote about the Connecticut River
And an early winter snowfall in Hartford
And the way sexual magic dissipated in his life
And what his Pennsylvania Dutch mother would think of his pretty
And explicitly atheist poems—
“Ach, mutter,” he wrote, “this old, black dress,
I have been embroidering French flowers on it”—
And the nature of imagination, and something
About the fact that you can regard blackbirds
From several points of view.
And Lola Ridge wrote about the New York ghetto
In something like the way Langston Hughes wrote about the Harlem streets
Because he perhaps took his manner at first from her
And from Carl Sandburg and, listening to the blues,
Made it his own when he described the rent parties
And the suicides and the grifters, the lovers, the numbers runners,
And the “boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred.”
And Mina Loy wrote about sex that was like pigs rooting,
Also, more fastidiously, the vowel sounds produced by a contemplation of the moon.
And Gertrude Stein. About was a writing. Outwardly. It was exceedingly about.
November 4, 2020
I enjoyed some of the poems in this collection, but many failed to resonate with me. It includes a few prose selections which are not mentioned in the book's subtitle. While Hass writes some poetry with shorter lines, making the poems easier to read, many feature almost page-width lines. I preferred the ones with shorter widths, and I preferred ones with topics that didn't seem like his daily journal written in poetic form.
August 27, 2024
i think i like this guy
October 8, 2019
A book of entirely new poems by Haas, a former Poet Laureate of the United States (1995-97). The poems discuss such topics as the volatility and intrinsic beauty of nature, dealing with loss at various stages in life, and meaning of desire. The poems are intelligent, intricate and beautiful. We found this advance copy of this book (coming out in early 2020) at a little library in our neighborhood. I really enjoyed the majority of the poems and will read more by Haas. 3 1/2 stars!
July 22, 2022
The reviews I've read -- by Chiasson and Heather Treseler -- struggle to grasp the strange tension expressive of this volume's myriad forms and occasions. For Chiasson the tension remains between expansion and compression, the poet of his fine essay, "Images," and the epic poet of California, of the long meditations that put him on the poetry-world map. For Treseler, Hass remains an Orphic poet, by which, she seems to mean, one struggling to "[address], with the seemliness of lyric, the baby boomers’ search for fulfillment — in art and erotic love; in science and psychotherapy; and in their own seasons of mating and molting" -- this is, of course, contemptuous, "OKBoomer"-ish, as its diction signals. More to paraphrase, Treseler says the Ophic struggle is to "know oneself and one's pleasures." Treseler's thematic analysis hearkens back all the way to 1980, when the poet Alan Shapiro wrote a take-down of Praise in which Shapiro essentially claimed Hass couldn't be the poet he was trying to be -- that, in brief, he didn't know himself.
Summer Snow is organized and formatted with lots of space inserted into the poems of five sections that offer a loose coherence to almost 20 (and maybe more) years of work; this, despite that it's only been 10 years since Hass's previous volume, The Apple Trees of Olema (with its uncollected work appearing alongside Hass's collected poems). Hass has got poems here that he's written at Squaw Valley (where he and his wife host a summer conference); he's got reporter's accounts of conferences he's attended in Europe, South Korea and elsewhere; traveler's diaries of trips taken with Code Pink (another of his wife Brenda Hillman's commitments); and elegies for writers remembered and admired, some he's known, some he's merely been acquainted with.
In short, Robert Hass is a literary man; a California poet; and a writer-translator who, as we all do, is trying to keep himself going. Hass's idea of a literary man is closest, in my mind, to Paul Goodman, the American philosopher of anarchism; poet-novelist-social critic; playwright of the avant garde, and gestalt psychologist (Hass knew him at Berkeley). Amid all these activities, Goodman was a fine poet, but his poetry changed once he published Growing Up Absurd in 1960, a critique of the youthful American males so prescient that Goodman became ubiquitous on college campuses and among the activist communities of the counterculture. He became, at that point, very much an occasional poet. (His ideas about "occasional poetry" were influential on Frank O'Hara.) He would not let his writing practice suffer for his having to hop on a plane and deliver a lecture somewhere. This, I feel (without evidence, other than this volume), is Hass' mode currently.
The mode wrecks havoc with Hass the California poet, whose model for writing California poems is Robinson Jeffers, in particular, Jeffers' Tehachapi pastorals of the late Twenties, like "The Loving Shepherdess," the erotic premises of which Hass shares. The first part of the book is uneven, but has nature poems like "To Be Accompanied by Flute and Zither," as well as the orphic "A Person Should," that use Jeffers' double plot to startling narrative effect, while the language has some of Snyder's snap.
The votary for the public writer just trying to keep going is Chekhov, so preoccupied in the East, who had in his own notebooks that Japanese lightness so inimical to the conflation of truth and art. Haikai means, just so, comic. A comic much different from the heaviness of Shapiro's Talmudic serio-comedy. Hass's notebooks cull a poem like "February Notebook: The Rains" that I think is superb.
Summer Snow is organized and formatted with lots of space inserted into the poems of five sections that offer a loose coherence to almost 20 (and maybe more) years of work; this, despite that it's only been 10 years since Hass's previous volume, The Apple Trees of Olema (with its uncollected work appearing alongside Hass's collected poems). Hass has got poems here that he's written at Squaw Valley (where he and his wife host a summer conference); he's got reporter's accounts of conferences he's attended in Europe, South Korea and elsewhere; traveler's diaries of trips taken with Code Pink (another of his wife Brenda Hillman's commitments); and elegies for writers remembered and admired, some he's known, some he's merely been acquainted with.
In short, Robert Hass is a literary man; a California poet; and a writer-translator who, as we all do, is trying to keep himself going. Hass's idea of a literary man is closest, in my mind, to Paul Goodman, the American philosopher of anarchism; poet-novelist-social critic; playwright of the avant garde, and gestalt psychologist (Hass knew him at Berkeley). Amid all these activities, Goodman was a fine poet, but his poetry changed once he published Growing Up Absurd in 1960, a critique of the youthful American males so prescient that Goodman became ubiquitous on college campuses and among the activist communities of the counterculture. He became, at that point, very much an occasional poet. (His ideas about "occasional poetry" were influential on Frank O'Hara.) He would not let his writing practice suffer for his having to hop on a plane and deliver a lecture somewhere. This, I feel (without evidence, other than this volume), is Hass' mode currently.
The mode wrecks havoc with Hass the California poet, whose model for writing California poems is Robinson Jeffers, in particular, Jeffers' Tehachapi pastorals of the late Twenties, like "The Loving Shepherdess," the erotic premises of which Hass shares. The first part of the book is uneven, but has nature poems like "To Be Accompanied by Flute and Zither," as well as the orphic "A Person Should," that use Jeffers' double plot to startling narrative effect, while the language has some of Snyder's snap.
The votary for the public writer just trying to keep going is Chekhov, so preoccupied in the East, who had in his own notebooks that Japanese lightness so inimical to the conflation of truth and art. Haikai means, just so, comic. A comic much different from the heaviness of Shapiro's Talmudic serio-comedy. Hass's notebooks cull a poem like "February Notebook: The Rains" that I think is superb.
October 8, 2024
Again, loving another Hass book! I am just so happy this poet is among us. Here's a short review I wrote for "The New York Journal of Books":
Robert Hass has become one of the living Grand Masters of American poetry. He has achieved his position by building a body of work slowly and consistently, always adding to themes and techniques he began exploring as a young poet. Summer Snow is his first collection since he published The Apple Trees at Olema almost ten years ago, and even that book was a “New and Selected Poems,” albeit one of the more significant of those we’ve had in quite some time.
In this new collection we can find quick, precise observations captured in short lines, much like those Hass wrote almost 50 years ago:
“After days of wind,
No wind.
The leaves of the aspen are still.
The leaves of the alder and cottonwood,
Juddering for days and cold,
Are still.”
The lines are uncluttered and vivid, but we are suddenly surprised by the word “juddering,” an unfamiliar word but one that seems absolutely appropriate even before we look it up to make sure Hass didn’t invent it.
But Hass also has longer poems made with long prosy lines that stretch across several lines and that often transform themselves into prose. In those longer poems, he is comfortable quoting other writers, or telling stories about them, using these other people as examples of living the life of the poet. He must mention 40 or 50, maybe more writers in this book, but none more than the Polish Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, with whom Hass worked very closely for many years doing English versions of Milosz’s poems.
In “An Argument About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain,” Hass feels comfortable enough in his friendship with Milosz to construct an argument he tells us he never had with the older poet. The poem begins, “My friend Czeslaw Milosz disapproved of surrealism.” Hass recounts several stories he may or may not have heard from Milosz about his life under German occupation during WWII—“After that he doesn’t want to read about French poets/Walking lobsters on a leash and doesn’t want to seem/To celebrate the fact that the world makes no sense.”
That willingness to engage in ideas—always founded in the precise observation that is the fundamental place of Hass’s aesthetic—allows him to write easily about philosophy, history, and politics. “Seoul Notebook,” a longish poem that recounts discussions and encounters at an international conference on peace, can easily enclose an observation like this—“Dialogue is not an easy way to peace. Dialogue begins not from politeness but from the possibility that the other may have legitimate claims, an attitude that is only bred, often, once violence has exhausted itself.” It is hard to think of another American poet who might risk such an abstraction in their poems.
Hass’s poems digress and diverge constantly. One begins with an iris in a glass vase on the kitchen counter, then jumps to 17th century Dutch painters, and ends with a vivid image of rain falling in a mountain pool in what is probably the High Sierras behind the poet’s house in Berkeley. And he does all of this, goes to all these places, in one page.
As Robert Hass approaches his ninth decade, he is comfortable in the wisdom and craft he has learned over a long and active life in his art. But his perceptions remain young and fresh and are as vibrant as any poet’s working today.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Robert Hass has become one of the living Grand Masters of American poetry. He has achieved his position by building a body of work slowly and consistently, always adding to themes and techniques he began exploring as a young poet. Summer Snow is his first collection since he published The Apple Trees at Olema almost ten years ago, and even that book was a “New and Selected Poems,” albeit one of the more significant of those we’ve had in quite some time.
In this new collection we can find quick, precise observations captured in short lines, much like those Hass wrote almost 50 years ago:
“After days of wind,
No wind.
The leaves of the aspen are still.
The leaves of the alder and cottonwood,
Juddering for days and cold,
Are still.”
The lines are uncluttered and vivid, but we are suddenly surprised by the word “juddering,” an unfamiliar word but one that seems absolutely appropriate even before we look it up to make sure Hass didn’t invent it.
But Hass also has longer poems made with long prosy lines that stretch across several lines and that often transform themselves into prose. In those longer poems, he is comfortable quoting other writers, or telling stories about them, using these other people as examples of living the life of the poet. He must mention 40 or 50, maybe more writers in this book, but none more than the Polish Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, with whom Hass worked very closely for many years doing English versions of Milosz’s poems.
In “An Argument About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain,” Hass feels comfortable enough in his friendship with Milosz to construct an argument he tells us he never had with the older poet. The poem begins, “My friend Czeslaw Milosz disapproved of surrealism.” Hass recounts several stories he may or may not have heard from Milosz about his life under German occupation during WWII—“After that he doesn’t want to read about French poets/Walking lobsters on a leash and doesn’t want to seem/To celebrate the fact that the world makes no sense.”
That willingness to engage in ideas—always founded in the precise observation that is the fundamental place of Hass’s aesthetic—allows him to write easily about philosophy, history, and politics. “Seoul Notebook,” a longish poem that recounts discussions and encounters at an international conference on peace, can easily enclose an observation like this—“Dialogue is not an easy way to peace. Dialogue begins not from politeness but from the possibility that the other may have legitimate claims, an attitude that is only bred, often, once violence has exhausted itself.” It is hard to think of another American poet who might risk such an abstraction in their poems.
Hass’s poems digress and diverge constantly. One begins with an iris in a glass vase on the kitchen counter, then jumps to 17th century Dutch painters, and ends with a vivid image of rain falling in a mountain pool in what is probably the High Sierras behind the poet’s house in Berkeley. And he does all of this, goes to all these places, in one page.
As Robert Hass approaches his ninth decade, he is comfortable in the wisdom and craft he has learned over a long and active life in his art. But his perceptions remain young and fresh and are as vibrant as any poet’s working today.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
July 27, 2020
One of my treats of the year. I'm so grateful for David Brady hipping me to Hass on here. The writing is beautiful. It dealt with death in a way that I found deeply moving. I was surprised, given the darkness of our times right now and my daily consumption of death stats, that Hass' focus on death (its not his only focus) became one of the things I loved most about this collection. He's incredible and I'll be reading EVERYTHING he writes.
December 15, 2021
In an effort to inject more poetry into my reading, I've attempted to draw from the known; for example, Leigh Stein's latest collection, What To Miss When, so enamored with her novel Self Care, I stumbled upon her poetry.
I'd started Robert Hass' elegiac collection, Summer Snow, in October, and coming in at 176 pages, quite long for a collection, I'd put it down; absorbing his meanderings on nature, the body politic, and what appears to be his life's work. Or, at the very least, fond and not so fond recollections.
From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States and he won a Pulitzer in 2008 for his collection, Time and Materials.
Summer Snow is his first collection since 2010, and it Is ambitious. The topics cover such a wide range.
But he keeps his sense of humor, such as in Small Act of Homage:
Reading Sophie Lafitte's biography of Chekhov
- what an admirable life! -
... bearing a beautifully foamy cappuccino,
the milk foam dripping down the sides
of the white ceramic cup.
I licked it off slowly for Chekov.
And, in A Person Should, more notebook, as he so often does here, than poem, he ponders whether poetry is sheet lightning in a summer field.
"Which I took to mean that a person should be able to name their psychic condition or make a figure of it or see it illuminated out there somewhere in the gravid air."
I'd started Robert Hass' elegiac collection, Summer Snow, in October, and coming in at 176 pages, quite long for a collection, I'd put it down; absorbing his meanderings on nature, the body politic, and what appears to be his life's work. Or, at the very least, fond and not so fond recollections.
From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States and he won a Pulitzer in 2008 for his collection, Time and Materials.
Summer Snow is his first collection since 2010, and it Is ambitious. The topics cover such a wide range.
But he keeps his sense of humor, such as in Small Act of Homage:
Reading Sophie Lafitte's biography of Chekhov
- what an admirable life! -
... bearing a beautifully foamy cappuccino,
the milk foam dripping down the sides
of the white ceramic cup.
I licked it off slowly for Chekov.
And, in A Person Should, more notebook, as he so often does here, than poem, he ponders whether poetry is sheet lightning in a summer field.
"Which I took to mean that a person should be able to name their psychic condition or make a figure of it or see it illuminated out there somewhere in the gravid air."
March 27, 2020
A new collection by the former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer prize winner. As he ages, of course, he looks back, recalling a lot of people who have passed on (there are so many mentions of people who are dead now), contemplating loss and beauty. Some of the political poems are the strongest in the collection, including a lovely poem about his experience at a peace conference in Korea and a protest at a military complex.
October 18, 2021
Hass is one of the best poets writing today, and this is a wonderful collection.
Read
December 23, 2021Beautiful. They poems did not move me as much as the poems in Human Wishes.
But maybe I need to read them more to develop the relationships.
But maybe I need to read them more to develop the relationships.
May 21, 2024
I enjoyed these poems and read one at least a day before finishing. I'm interested in reading more of his work.
June 9, 2020
For me this new collection felt like a slow start but part of that may have been my own state of mind. Maybe it was fitting that I didn’t really get engrossed in the poems until summer had begun and my life had slowed down enough for me to sit peacefully and read attentively.
Robert Hass’ poetry is powerful while also making the creation of poetry feel achievable—like something we all can, and should, do. I forget who once defined poetry as “language that exists for the sole purpose of existing”. It’s not selling you a product, completing a business transaction, or even giving directions for how to accomplish some mundane task or chore. It can be directions for living a good life though. Hass’ style reads so much like it was lifted straight from the pages of his personal notebook. That’s what makes it feel motivating, and poetry achievable. At the same time, the information across the lines is clearly well researched and there is undeniably a sense of form that is artfully crafted. So that appearance of natural, immediate thought is actually part of the design. It’s a ridiculous miracle of writing that Hass so often reaches.
Hass has a certain spirituality that I am drawn to. Desire is a concept felt and investigated across many of his poems, not just in this book. To me, he does the work of offering insights and reminders for how to practice a U.S.-Buddhism. Meditation—following a noble path in life—is a practice. Lines like this. . .
purification: the desire
for the cessation of desire
is a desire.
. . . remind me to pause, breathe, and reconsider what it means to be a good practitioner. These lines can be found on page 91, “February Notebook: The Rains”, “A Memory”.
In times that test our hope, meditation is an important practice that it is far too easy to lose sight of. “After Xue Di” tells us “There are ways of not quitting / morally.” Immediately after, “Dancing” opens “the radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America / Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation / Of happiness”.
Hass is also concerned with translation. Two translations from Anglo-Saxon are in Summer Snow. And the feeling associated with the inherent issue of translation is explored in “Large Bouquet of Summer Flowers, or Allegory of the Imagination”:
. . . we are haunted
Or even constituted by the teasing awareness
Of the presence in ourselves of an unreachable
And twinned other which creates the small shock
We feel when we sense the dissimilarity in metaphors
And the way that a translation doesn’t feel like a twin.
Hass’ attempts toward a “boundless poetics” will delight those who find pleasure and fascination in language as a uniquely human tool. His perspectives on both language and spirituality are a delight to me, whose early interests in literature and Buddhism can be traced back to a teenage reading of an English translation of Siddhartha from Herman Hesse’s German.
If you’re interested but unsure about how to dive into understanding and appreciating Hass’ particular approach to poetry, start from what might be the climax of Summer Snow read as a whole: “Seoul Notebook” (pages 137-144, about 80% through the book).
This is one of his poems that reads a lot like prose, a short non-fiction narrative in two parts. The first part is “1. First Day of the Conference on Peace”. Hass describes his visit to the Institute of Korean Studies with gorgeous imagery and thought-provoking quotes from those attending the conference, lifted from his notebook. Of course, no consensus on how to reach world peace was achieved (otherwise I’m sure you would have read this book already). But, the act of reading what Hass has described can bring each of us, individually, closer and closer incrementally. This poem gives the reader plenty to think about, including even the existence, purpose, implications of such a conference attended overwhelmingly by the “mostly male, mostly middle-aged” served food and drink by young women working the event.
The second part is “2. Mouths of Babes”. One woman attending the event is the wife of a Korean professor of the philosophy of science. She’s from Kansas so Hass can talk to her casually in English as well as her daughter, Holly. When saying their goodbyes after the event Holly says “We’ve got to think our way to world peace.”
There’s more depth to this when you read the whole “Seoul Notebook” poem, which I am urging you to do here. I hope it motivates you to read more from this wondrous new collection. There’s plenty to think about.
Robert Hass’ poetry is powerful while also making the creation of poetry feel achievable—like something we all can, and should, do. I forget who once defined poetry as “language that exists for the sole purpose of existing”. It’s not selling you a product, completing a business transaction, or even giving directions for how to accomplish some mundane task or chore. It can be directions for living a good life though. Hass’ style reads so much like it was lifted straight from the pages of his personal notebook. That’s what makes it feel motivating, and poetry achievable. At the same time, the information across the lines is clearly well researched and there is undeniably a sense of form that is artfully crafted. So that appearance of natural, immediate thought is actually part of the design. It’s a ridiculous miracle of writing that Hass so often reaches.
Hass has a certain spirituality that I am drawn to. Desire is a concept felt and investigated across many of his poems, not just in this book. To me, he does the work of offering insights and reminders for how to practice a U.S.-Buddhism. Meditation—following a noble path in life—is a practice. Lines like this. . .
purification: the desire
for the cessation of desire
is a desire.
. . . remind me to pause, breathe, and reconsider what it means to be a good practitioner. These lines can be found on page 91, “February Notebook: The Rains”, “A Memory”.
In times that test our hope, meditation is an important practice that it is far too easy to lose sight of. “After Xue Di” tells us “There are ways of not quitting / morally.” Immediately after, “Dancing” opens “the radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America / Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation / Of happiness”.
Hass is also concerned with translation. Two translations from Anglo-Saxon are in Summer Snow. And the feeling associated with the inherent issue of translation is explored in “Large Bouquet of Summer Flowers, or Allegory of the Imagination”:
. . . we are haunted
Or even constituted by the teasing awareness
Of the presence in ourselves of an unreachable
And twinned other which creates the small shock
We feel when we sense the dissimilarity in metaphors
And the way that a translation doesn’t feel like a twin.
Hass’ attempts toward a “boundless poetics” will delight those who find pleasure and fascination in language as a uniquely human tool. His perspectives on both language and spirituality are a delight to me, whose early interests in literature and Buddhism can be traced back to a teenage reading of an English translation of Siddhartha from Herman Hesse’s German.
If you’re interested but unsure about how to dive into understanding and appreciating Hass’ particular approach to poetry, start from what might be the climax of Summer Snow read as a whole: “Seoul Notebook” (pages 137-144, about 80% through the book).
This is one of his poems that reads a lot like prose, a short non-fiction narrative in two parts. The first part is “1. First Day of the Conference on Peace”. Hass describes his visit to the Institute of Korean Studies with gorgeous imagery and thought-provoking quotes from those attending the conference, lifted from his notebook. Of course, no consensus on how to reach world peace was achieved (otherwise I’m sure you would have read this book already). But, the act of reading what Hass has described can bring each of us, individually, closer and closer incrementally. This poem gives the reader plenty to think about, including even the existence, purpose, implications of such a conference attended overwhelmingly by the “mostly male, mostly middle-aged” served food and drink by young women working the event.
The second part is “2. Mouths of Babes”. One woman attending the event is the wife of a Korean professor of the philosophy of science. She’s from Kansas so Hass can talk to her casually in English as well as her daughter, Holly. When saying their goodbyes after the event Holly says “We’ve got to think our way to world peace.”
There’s more depth to this when you read the whole “Seoul Notebook” poem, which I am urging you to do here. I hope it motivates you to read more from this wondrous new collection. There’s plenty to think about.
July 1, 2022
After reading five new collections of poetry in a row plus an annual anthology, all of which left me almost totally unengaged and at a loss to say anything remotely meaningful about them, it was deeply satisfying to take up Robert Hass’s SUMMER SNOW. It’s his first collection since his invaluable 2010 THE APPLE TREES AT OLAMA: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it further secures Hass’s position as one of America’s finest living poets.
There isn’t a trace of obscurantism or deliberate obfuscation in Hass. He’s more knowledgeable than most of us, but he never tries to overwhelm us with, just shares, his knowledge. He consistently delivers to the reader the same clarity that he evidently wants for himself.
Here’s “Abbott’s Lagoon, October”:
The first thing that is apt to raise your eyes
Above the dove-grey and silvery thickets
Of lupine and coyote bush and artichoke thistle
On the sandy, windy path from the parking lot
To the beach at Abbott’s Lagoon is the white flash
Of the marsh hawk’s rump as it skims low
Over the coastal scrub. White-crowned sparrows
Loud in the lupine even in October, even
In the drizzly rain, startle and disappear.
And the burbling songs and clucks of the quail
That you may or may not even have noticed you were noticing
Go mute and you are there in October and the rain,
And the hawk soars past, first hawk, then shadow
Of a hawk, not much of a shadow in the rain, low sun
Silvering through clouds a little to the west.
It’s almost sundown. And this is the new weather
At the beginning of the middle of the California fall
When rain puts at end to the long sweet days
Of our September when the skies are clear, days mild,
And the roots of the plants have gripped down
Into the five-or-six-month drought, have licked
All the moisture they are going to lick
From the summer fogs, and it is very good to be walking
Because you can almost hear the earth sigh
As it sucks up the rain, here where mid-October
Is the beginning of winter, which is the beginning
Of a spring greening, as if the sound you are hearing
Is spring and winter lying down in one another’s arms
Under the hawk’s shadow among the coastal scrub,
Ocean in the distance and the faintest sound of surf
And a few egrets bright white, working the reeds
At the water’s edge, in October in the rain.
Now read that again aloud. You’ll want to do that often with Hass, savoring his vowels and consonants and his closeness to the informal but definite rhythms of American speech, but speech of the most careful and reverent if often playful order.
From the beginning of his career, with the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets selection FIELD GUIDE, Hass’s work has been distinguished by his keen and affectionate eye for the landscapes, leaves, weather and patterns of the natural world. (I tell myself that he would probably enjoy knowing that at one time my mnemonic for remembering his name, now indelible, was the word “avocado.”)
From “Nature Notes”:
People study everything. The excrement
Of beetles. The sonic niches of the blackbird’s song,
And the sexual excesses of the cottonwood
Which pours thousands of seeds into the air.
So I know that for one to germinate, it has to alight
In moist, sandy soil. A sandbar in the curve
Of a little alpine creek would be just right.
Hass is not above an occasional poem in which he seems to be just horsing around. Surely you and I, unlike certain stuffed-shirt critics, can welcome and enjoy this. Nor is he averse to bringing the social and environmental issues of our times into his poetry, as in “The Greech Notebook” and “Seoul Notebook.” These also will probably annoy the stuffed shirts, who insist that poetry must forever be above the fray.
Hass’s latest collection is a strong addition to a mighty body of work.
There isn’t a trace of obscurantism or deliberate obfuscation in Hass. He’s more knowledgeable than most of us, but he never tries to overwhelm us with, just shares, his knowledge. He consistently delivers to the reader the same clarity that he evidently wants for himself.
Here’s “Abbott’s Lagoon, October”:
The first thing that is apt to raise your eyes
Above the dove-grey and silvery thickets
Of lupine and coyote bush and artichoke thistle
On the sandy, windy path from the parking lot
To the beach at Abbott’s Lagoon is the white flash
Of the marsh hawk’s rump as it skims low
Over the coastal scrub. White-crowned sparrows
Loud in the lupine even in October, even
In the drizzly rain, startle and disappear.
And the burbling songs and clucks of the quail
That you may or may not even have noticed you were noticing
Go mute and you are there in October and the rain,
And the hawk soars past, first hawk, then shadow
Of a hawk, not much of a shadow in the rain, low sun
Silvering through clouds a little to the west.
It’s almost sundown. And this is the new weather
At the beginning of the middle of the California fall
When rain puts at end to the long sweet days
Of our September when the skies are clear, days mild,
And the roots of the plants have gripped down
Into the five-or-six-month drought, have licked
All the moisture they are going to lick
From the summer fogs, and it is very good to be walking
Because you can almost hear the earth sigh
As it sucks up the rain, here where mid-October
Is the beginning of winter, which is the beginning
Of a spring greening, as if the sound you are hearing
Is spring and winter lying down in one another’s arms
Under the hawk’s shadow among the coastal scrub,
Ocean in the distance and the faintest sound of surf
And a few egrets bright white, working the reeds
At the water’s edge, in October in the rain.
Now read that again aloud. You’ll want to do that often with Hass, savoring his vowels and consonants and his closeness to the informal but definite rhythms of American speech, but speech of the most careful and reverent if often playful order.
From the beginning of his career, with the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets selection FIELD GUIDE, Hass’s work has been distinguished by his keen and affectionate eye for the landscapes, leaves, weather and patterns of the natural world. (I tell myself that he would probably enjoy knowing that at one time my mnemonic for remembering his name, now indelible, was the word “avocado.”)
From “Nature Notes”:
People study everything. The excrement
Of beetles. The sonic niches of the blackbird’s song,
And the sexual excesses of the cottonwood
Which pours thousands of seeds into the air.
So I know that for one to germinate, it has to alight
In moist, sandy soil. A sandbar in the curve
Of a little alpine creek would be just right.
Hass is not above an occasional poem in which he seems to be just horsing around. Surely you and I, unlike certain stuffed-shirt critics, can welcome and enjoy this. Nor is he averse to bringing the social and environmental issues of our times into his poetry, as in “The Greech Notebook” and “Seoul Notebook.” These also will probably annoy the stuffed shirts, who insist that poetry must forever be above the fray.
Hass’s latest collection is a strong addition to a mighty body of work.
November 9, 2021
These poems were written more like short stories rather than in the traditional style of poetry, which threw me off a little. Most of this collection was good, but I didn't find that I connected with any of the pieces individually.
July 15, 2019
Itō Jakuchū smeared a paste of egg yolk
And white paint on the back of his scrolls
And then crushed oyster shell to another paste
And added carmine for the rooster’s crest
He painted into the soft silk.
Smuggled Prussian blues from Europe (There was a Tokugawa trade embargo)
For the way light looked on plums.
I’m not a vast lover of poetry.
Naturally, that fact is not due to poetry, but to how I have found poetry; it’s all in my head, as with my inability to love fusion jazz, mud, and war.
OK, fair enough; I do love some jazz.
What I do have an issue with is when poets use hard words or obtuse references that don’t really pay off.
On the other hand, I do like it when poets use words for perfect fit.
I’ve not read anything that Hass has written previously, but the introduction to this book, which is a collection of poems as divided into several different parts, made me doubt that I would enjoy it; name- and place-dropping littered the initial poems, which gives off an iffy scent that signals “I am learned. I am good at what I do. See my excellence.”
To myself, that is.
Hass’s style changes dramatically from the poems that are about Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Those longer, more in-depth ones, where Hass has shed the name-dropping, that’s lovely. For example:
And if you read good books well, it will wake in you
A desire to say what you mean.
At least it did in me.
The things that you read that matter to you,
The things they call your influences,
are the books That introduce you to yourself,
and they will lead,
Or ought to, to a patient persistent attempt
To say what you mean.”
Another note reads: “You have to write blind to eventually see clearly
What your subject is.”
A close, humid room
In the middle of Tennessee in the middle of July.
Outside you could not tell if the green hum
In the old live oaks was generating the insect buzz
Or the buzz was generating the green humming
In the air that was indistinguishable,
When you walked in it, from the soaked
Odor of the summer grass.
I was an outsider
To what I took to be this transaction in heritage.
It’s a calm, long gaze into a field of green, this is. If I forget the first fifth of the book, which I nearly do, I will be left with the memory of a poetry collection that is both potent and rises. At its worst, this book is a bit haughty to me, but then again, I don’t get fusion jazz.
March 15, 2024
I love Robert Hass's sensibility. He writes poems that are steeped in the natural world, the political world, marriage, history. Always there is a sense of awareness...of people and their passions, of nature and the specificity of birds, mountains, flowers, trees. Hass's mind is tuned into the world with such intense focus. He makes me want to write, to pay closer attention, to know the names of everything...and to have that knowledge be intense, both in the specifics and in the larger picture, in the reverberations.
Long ago, when I was teaching third grade, I spend time every week sharing poetry with my students and having them write themselves. In spring we were often outside writing. At that time, Robert Hass was the U.S. Poet Laureate. I sent several student poems to a contest, and a little girl names Lyle won the top honor. She visited Washington D.C. with her mother and received the award. Months...maybe even several years later, I was in a class with Hass...and he remembered Lyle and her poem. The extraordinary last line...after lines about the the end of winter. "I need the spring to come." That he remembered says so much about who Hass is. He seems to store so many people and places and poems and living things inside himself...this is what his poems sing...the sorrow and glory of the world...from epochal memories to memories of a particular walk on the mountains near the home he shares with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman.
What a gift he and his poetry have been to me and my students.
Long ago, when I was teaching third grade, I spend time every week sharing poetry with my students and having them write themselves. In spring we were often outside writing. At that time, Robert Hass was the U.S. Poet Laureate. I sent several student poems to a contest, and a little girl names Lyle won the top honor. She visited Washington D.C. with her mother and received the award. Months...maybe even several years later, I was in a class with Hass...and he remembered Lyle and her poem. The extraordinary last line...after lines about the the end of winter. "I need the spring to come." That he remembered says so much about who Hass is. He seems to store so many people and places and poems and living things inside himself...this is what his poems sing...the sorrow and glory of the world...from epochal memories to memories of a particular walk on the mountains near the home he shares with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman.
What a gift he and his poetry have been to me and my students.
February 28, 2020
This was incredibly difficult to finish. I read it over the course of a few days and often reread poems from the day before, because as soon as I put this down I had absolutely no memory of it.
Hass' imagery stuck out at some points, but I found his work super boring overall. I know that I typically lean towards a more modern style of poetry, but I was really frustrated at how little meaning I was getting out of his work, especially given how much effort I was putting into reading this.
Hass' imagery stuck out at some points, but I found his work super boring overall. I know that I typically lean towards a more modern style of poetry, but I was really frustrated at how little meaning I was getting out of his work, especially given how much effort I was putting into reading this.
September 9, 2021
Oh lordy, I finished this.
It was not my style. I don't love reading poems about Cézanne and drones and people I've never heard of, etc. Maybe I'm a dumbass, I don't know.
I did like "Death in Childhood," "Abbott's Lagoon: October," "A Person Should," "Grand Canyon in February," "Nature Notes 2," and "After Xue Di."
It was not my style. I don't love reading poems about Cézanne and drones and people I've never heard of, etc. Maybe I'm a dumbass, I don't know.
I did like "Death in Childhood," "Abbott's Lagoon: October," "A Person Should," "Grand Canyon in February," "Nature Notes 2," and "After Xue Di."
September 3, 2023
The poet pours full of emotions into each poem, about the attention to daily affairs and war, and the love for nature, makes me feel that the poet is an elf walking in the forest of words, who can put the flowers and plants in front of him into a wreath with its own characteristics, so as to become a small gift, ready to meet every readers who pick up and read.
Staying at the age of twenty, we have indeed failed to leave the passionate of life and flow. The beating beat makes us jump on the road, always active in what we want to do, and continue to burn curiosity about life. The topic of “death” has always been inseparable from the mouth, which seems to be difficult to contact, but in fact, we have been moving forward. The days of life are counting down, and every minute has become precious. The poet describes the state of twenty years old very closely. The so-called “gathering things together”, the people of the same stratosphere are always attracted to each other, and their youth is sweating in it. Until the age of thirty, the corners of this enthusiasm are gradually removed, facing the real real world, coldly looking at everything around them. I can’t help but think about a question again. In fact, can the enthusiasm that has been worn out regain the same degree of enthusiasm after the age of thirty? Everyone dies for different reasons. Occasionally, I can imagine why I leave the world.
When we have time to recover, we all take a walk in the words, enjoy the fun brought by reading, and distract me from my excessive concentration in daily life. The appearance looks mature, but the heart is just an ordinary child. Maybe we occasionally need a space to give us to play the small universe, keep imagining in our minds, and wear the boots jumped and ran with a smiling face.
Staying at the age of twenty, we have indeed failed to leave the passionate of life and flow. The beating beat makes us jump on the road, always active in what we want to do, and continue to burn curiosity about life. The topic of “death” has always been inseparable from the mouth, which seems to be difficult to contact, but in fact, we have been moving forward. The days of life are counting down, and every minute has become precious. The poet describes the state of twenty years old very closely. The so-called “gathering things together”, the people of the same stratosphere are always attracted to each other, and their youth is sweating in it. Until the age of thirty, the corners of this enthusiasm are gradually removed, facing the real real world, coldly looking at everything around them. I can’t help but think about a question again. In fact, can the enthusiasm that has been worn out regain the same degree of enthusiasm after the age of thirty? Everyone dies for different reasons. Occasionally, I can imagine why I leave the world.
When we have time to recover, we all take a walk in the words, enjoy the fun brought by reading, and distract me from my excessive concentration in daily life. The appearance looks mature, but the heart is just an ordinary child. Maybe we occasionally need a space to give us to play the small universe, keep imagining in our minds, and wear the boots jumped and ran with a smiling face.
May 8, 2025
I liked this book of poetry despite myself. The first poem had some graphic details and I thought what have I gotten myself into? It’s no longer April and national poetry month, the book came to me on hold from the library too late, I don’t need to pretend I enjoy poetry and try to be exposed to more of it. However, I kept going and things did improve, the occasional graphic detail was rare rather than the point of many poems. Another downside for me, besides some graphic details, were references, often literary, that I knew enough to recognize as references but not to make whatever connections he may have been going for with the name drop. It did tickle me a bit when I did know the reference though.
Listening to this book made me wish for a poet that spoke of my experiences. I could relate to some of what was being said but it was not my lifetime or point of view though I could recognize things as part of my lifetime or history I learned. It made me wish there was someone who was writing my life, someone my age with a similar point of view. I don’t think there really is anyone writing poetry who has had the same experiences as me, or if there is someone the chances of me ever stumbling across them is so very slim because how do you even find poets? It’s not quite enough desire to make me want to write the poetry myself.
I listened to this at high speed, 2-2.5 which probably affected my experience with possibly savoring the poems (if I was one to do that anyway), but it also made the author who was reading it sound like a younger man. I switched to normal speed at the very end just to hear what he actually sounds like and his age really hit and it made me glad that I’d experienced listening to it in a voice that seemed closer to my own age.
Listening to this book made me wish for a poet that spoke of my experiences. I could relate to some of what was being said but it was not my lifetime or point of view though I could recognize things as part of my lifetime or history I learned. It made me wish there was someone who was writing my life, someone my age with a similar point of view. I don’t think there really is anyone writing poetry who has had the same experiences as me, or if there is someone the chances of me ever stumbling across them is so very slim because how do you even find poets? It’s not quite enough desire to make me want to write the poetry myself.
I listened to this at high speed, 2-2.5 which probably affected my experience with possibly savoring the poems (if I was one to do that anyway), but it also made the author who was reading it sound like a younger man. I switched to normal speed at the very end just to hear what he actually sounds like and his age really hit and it made me glad that I’d experienced listening to it in a voice that seemed closer to my own age.
June 18, 2021
First Poem
In the dream, he was a hawk with blood on its beak.
In the dream, he was a hawk.
In the dream, he was a woman naked, indolent from pleasure, a gleam of sperm on her vaginal lips.
In the dream, he was a woman.
(He could both be the woman and see the viscid fluid in the dream.)
In the dream, he was a turquoise bird fashioned from blue stone by a people who dug it from the earth and believed it was the shattered sky of a foreworld.
In the dream, he was the turquoise bird.
In the dream, his feet hurt, there was a long way still to go, lizards scuttling in the dust.
In the dream his feet hurt.
In the dream, he was an old man, his woman gone, who woke early each day and made his pot of coffee and sliced bits of melons for the lizards and set them on the hard ground by the garden wall.
In the dream, he was the old man.
The calm mouth of the lizards as they waited, themselves the color of the dust, meant that every creature was solitary and singular on the earth.
In the dream, the woman in the elevator took out her eye.
It was a moon in the dream.
In the dream, there was a knock on the door and it was a troop of begging children and he said to them in mock outrage, “You! Scoot! This is not your day. Tuesday is your day,” and the children laughed with great good humor.
Their day was Tuesday in the dream.
In the dream, he was a hawk with blood on its beak.
In the dream, he was a hawk.
In the dream, he was a woman naked, indolent from pleasure, a gleam of sperm on her vaginal lips.
In the dream, he was a woman.
(He could both be the woman and see the viscid fluid in the dream.)
In the dream, he was a turquoise bird fashioned from blue stone by a people who dug it from the earth and believed it was the shattered sky of a foreworld.
In the dream, he was the turquoise bird.
In the dream, his feet hurt, there was a long way still to go, lizards scuttling in the dust.
In the dream his feet hurt.
In the dream, he was an old man, his woman gone, who woke early each day and made his pot of coffee and sliced bits of melons for the lizards and set them on the hard ground by the garden wall.
In the dream, he was the old man.
The calm mouth of the lizards as they waited, themselves the color of the dust, meant that every creature was solitary and singular on the earth.
In the dream, the woman in the elevator took out her eye.
It was a moon in the dream.
In the dream, there was a knock on the door and it was a troop of begging children and he said to them in mock outrage, “You! Scoot! This is not your day. Tuesday is your day,” and the children laughed with great good humor.
Their day was Tuesday in the dream.
December 13, 2022
Cymbeline
"Everything we do is explaining the sunrise. / Dying explains it. Making love explains it. // The last plays of Shakespeare explain it. / We're just as ignorant as at the beginning. // We make Stonehenge over and over / Thinking it will do some good to know where // Or at least when: flame fissuring up between two stones. / It lifts us as sex arches the body, up, it carries us, up and over, / And no one knows why or when it will stop, / So everything we do is explaining the sunrise."
Hass uses multiple styles and themes throughout this collection; most notable are his first-person narrative prose poems. The book is broken into various sections, each one focusing on a different topic, be it death/loss, the art of poetry, nature, or war. Although he is a college professor, you never feel as though you are being lectured or talked-down to. Rather, one gets the feeling the author is taking you aside to have a discussion, or to recount an anecdote. Although it doesn't happen as often as I would like, there are moments where you are awed by a single line or phrase. This is what I am looking for in poetry, what I crave: to be overcome by words. Hass brings an intimacy and humanity to the art.
3.5 stars
"Everything we do is explaining the sunrise. / Dying explains it. Making love explains it. // The last plays of Shakespeare explain it. / We're just as ignorant as at the beginning. // We make Stonehenge over and over / Thinking it will do some good to know where // Or at least when: flame fissuring up between two stones. / It lifts us as sex arches the body, up, it carries us, up and over, / And no one knows why or when it will stop, / So everything we do is explaining the sunrise."
Hass uses multiple styles and themes throughout this collection; most notable are his first-person narrative prose poems. The book is broken into various sections, each one focusing on a different topic, be it death/loss, the art of poetry, nature, or war. Although he is a college professor, you never feel as though you are being lectured or talked-down to. Rather, one gets the feeling the author is taking you aside to have a discussion, or to recount an anecdote. Although it doesn't happen as often as I would like, there are moments where you are awed by a single line or phrase. This is what I am looking for in poetry, what I crave: to be overcome by words. Hass brings an intimacy and humanity to the art.
3.5 stars
July 10, 2025
robert hass has been allowed to think his words are important and good for too long
where the FUCK was his editor on this
could've cut this down by at least two thirds
or idk work on it for longer and come up with a collection of more quality poems
this nowhere near justified how fucking long it was
all over the place and nothing (coherent) to say
objectification of women is so fucking annoying and old like you're too old for this
every time a woman is mentioned it's her breasts
i believe he is a poet though and sometimes he does hit a truth
but then follows it up with something about a rosy nipple ohhh bobby h when i catch you-
favorites
- stanzas for a sierra morning
- poem not an elegy in a season of elegies
- the poet at nine
- dream in the summer of my seventy-third year
- sunglasses billboard in termini station
- pertinent divagations toward an ode to inuit carvers
- large bouquet of summer flowers, or allegory of the imagination
- john muir, a dream, a waterfall, a mountain ash
- montale's notebooks
- small act of homage
lines
- life in its exuberance rushing straight uphill toward death
- the long self-erasing / sentence of a silver wake
- the only way out is to merge into the caravan / of mourners
- aluminum / linoleum
where the FUCK was his editor on this
could've cut this down by at least two thirds
or idk work on it for longer and come up with a collection of more quality poems
this nowhere near justified how fucking long it was
all over the place and nothing (coherent) to say
objectification of women is so fucking annoying and old like you're too old for this
every time a woman is mentioned it's her breasts
i believe he is a poet though and sometimes he does hit a truth
but then follows it up with something about a rosy nipple ohhh bobby h when i catch you-
favorites
- stanzas for a sierra morning
- poem not an elegy in a season of elegies
- the poet at nine
- dream in the summer of my seventy-third year
- sunglasses billboard in termini station
- pertinent divagations toward an ode to inuit carvers
- large bouquet of summer flowers, or allegory of the imagination
- john muir, a dream, a waterfall, a mountain ash
- montale's notebooks
- small act of homage
lines
- life in its exuberance rushing straight uphill toward death
- the long self-erasing / sentence of a silver wake
- the only way out is to merge into the caravan / of mourners
- aluminum / linoleum
April 14, 2020
"Good reading
is acute listening. It models
the transformation of otherness
that is the mystery at the heart of ordinary kindness
and also the possibility of a moral life."
--from the Robert Hass poem "Seoul Notebook"
I had never read Hass before. This new volume was well reviewed in a recent New Yorker so I ordered it as part of my quarantine binging on poetry.
This is some of the easiest to read poetry I've ever read, moving at a pace and syntax closer to prose in many of the poems. I found myself reading long sections of the book instead of only a few poems at a time, like I often do with poetry.
The themes of the poems vary, including the Sierras, death, aging, peace movements, other writers, and more.
Also, interestingly, the poem quoted above, "Seoul Notebook," ends in a hotel in Kearney, Nebraska.
is acute listening. It models
the transformation of otherness
that is the mystery at the heart of ordinary kindness
and also the possibility of a moral life."
--from the Robert Hass poem "Seoul Notebook"
I had never read Hass before. This new volume was well reviewed in a recent New Yorker so I ordered it as part of my quarantine binging on poetry.
This is some of the easiest to read poetry I've ever read, moving at a pace and syntax closer to prose in many of the poems. I found myself reading long sections of the book instead of only a few poems at a time, like I often do with poetry.
The themes of the poems vary, including the Sierras, death, aging, peace movements, other writers, and more.
Also, interestingly, the poem quoted above, "Seoul Notebook," ends in a hotel in Kearney, Nebraska.
May 5, 2022
3.7 really. Not my favorite Hass book, but I liked it, and as usual there are really strong effects that he is able to pull off with his signature understated language. You have the typical nature reflection poems here with jump out lines like:
"Not sure what the verb is for cottonwoods
in a princeling wind."
And a really engaging and funny poem called "The Sixth Sheikh's Sheep's Sick" about tongue-twisters, a bird, and language itself.
One of the cool things about Hass is that he often pulls back the curtain and narrates how the very poem you are reading came to be in his own mind. Some of the longer poems don't really amount to the hoped for pay-off in my opinion, but Hass is certainly a master of the "prose poem" form and it is practically an obligation to read any new poetry collection the guy publishes.
"Not sure what the verb is for cottonwoods
in a princeling wind."
And a really engaging and funny poem called "The Sixth Sheikh's Sheep's Sick" about tongue-twisters, a bird, and language itself.
One of the cool things about Hass is that he often pulls back the curtain and narrates how the very poem you are reading came to be in his own mind. Some of the longer poems don't really amount to the hoped for pay-off in my opinion, but Hass is certainly a master of the "prose poem" form and it is practically an obligation to read any new poetry collection the guy publishes.
Read
June 30, 2025While I struggled to get into some of the prose poems in this collection, I enjoyed the way that Hass examined nature in his work. I can definitely see an influence of Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers (two of my favorite poets). It was also fun to read any references to his wife, Brenda Hillman, who was a professor of mine in college. She would affectionately refer to him as just "Bob" so that's how I always picture him in my mind.
My favorite poems in the collection: "Three Old Men", "To Be Accompanied by Flute and Zither", "Smoking in Heaven", "Sunglasses Billboard in Termini Station", and "Hotel Room".
My favorite poems in the collection: "Three Old Men", "To Be Accompanied by Flute and Zither", "Smoking in Heaven", "Sunglasses Billboard in Termini Station", and "Hotel Room".
February 21, 2024
Whether about nature, the death and suicide of friends, tumultuous politics, the violence of history, these poems are breathless in their summations of passing time, and waste no time in documenting personal memories while juxtaposing them with public events, or the thoughts and imagined words of other poets in conversation with Hass. Some poems captured more than a few lives within them, singing for almost all of us; the daring to do so is so immensely moving that Hass's voice lives on in my head as a lyrical commentator of what it means to be human in our troubled times.
December 22, 2024
someone said that robert hass would like us to know that he thinks about sex, poets, and birds in his yard. he also, seemingly, has been thinking quite a lot about life cycles and death cycles. he was born to be a poet, so i’ll never complain when he indulges in the poetic tradition. whether or not this is his strongest collection matters not even in a little in my arbitration of this five star rating, bc hass is a poet
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