Field Guide

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Robert Hass, Stanley Kunitz (Foreword)

The first collection of poems by Robert Hass, one of contemporary American poetry’s most celebrated and widely read voices, and the 68th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets
 
The winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, present sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2019

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

[Mag · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 || you had me at fall, you lost me at in weather, you had me again at letter

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"My God, it is a test,
this riding out the dying of the West."

Hass's first book of poetry, filled already with incredible use of language, great descriptions, particularly of the California coast, and intriguing ideas. With some that to me don't fully work or hold up over the decades.