The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

by Robert Hass

“No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass.”—Atlantic Monthly The National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees at Olema is a cause for celebration.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Fiction

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 5, 2010

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

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Hass' meter and you hear stories,
stories of love, pain, romance, depression, and sexuality.
Accessible narratives told through verse,
yet you still have the mystery of poetry:

Here everything seems clear,
firmly etched against the pale
smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl's clover,
rotting wharves.

The collection is divided into a few chapbooks, each book containing its unique aura. Longer poems, like "Some of David's Story,"contained sectioned pauses that I really liked because I could stop to consider the mystery as I brewed a cup of Espresso:

She was sitting beside me and I looked at her hands/
in her lap. Her beautiful hands. And I thought about/
the way she was carrying the whole of the world's violence/
and cruelty in her body, or trying to, because/
she thought the rest of us couldn't or wouldn't.

I love the way he uses enjambment,the way he uses punctuation, even the way he uses contractions. And what of his subtle description of bad sex: "two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious/startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet/lubricious glue, stare at each other/and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically."

I love when the beautiful simplicity of poetry finds you where you are and you discover pieces of yourself within its lines. "Novella" was one of my top picks. The poem is memory and trauma wrapped in soothing lines that flow on the page like a calming lake with riveting waves:

When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched/
by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her/
life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-colored/
or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the/
design she was making.

Note: I've had to use blockquotes AND line break indicators here because the Goodreads' review spacing automatically strips away at the longer lines found within these stanzas. Urgh.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the poems of Robert Hass because they're so enormous in scope. His poems are large blocks of prose, built like a loaf of bread in which metaphors have been embedded like raisins. I like it that his poems are so developed, so all-encompassing. Hass is like a brilliant dinner conversationalist--he starts in one place but elegantly touches on several ideas before he's finished. Though tightly controlled, it seems a little like verbal improvisation. You think he's lost his way in the poem. But he's not so much making a point as gradually arriving at it so that suddenly you're aware that truth, for instance, is in the eye of the raven, or that knowledge is an act of leaving one way of living to begin another. If every poem is a closed system, it's even more evident with Hass. He begins at one end and somehow walks the tightrope to arrive at the other end. As he walks you realize two things: he's brilliant and he loves everything he writes about. And he sees and writes it all with such gentleness you want each poem to go on. You want to keep biting the loaf, finding every raisin of possibility.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
*
I’ve watched memory wound you.
I felt nothing but envy.
Having slept in wet meadows,
I was not through desiring.
Imagine January and the beach,
a bleached sky, gulls. And
look seaward: what is not there
is there, isn’t it, the huge
bird of the first light
arched above first waters
beyond our touching or intention
or the reasonable shore.
*
All day
you were in a body. Now
you are in a skull. Wind,
streetlights, trees flicker
on the ceiling in the dark.
*
how love fails in our well-meaning hands
*
[...] beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully
and went so deep that any kind of love
can fail.
*
And because beauty is a little unendurable,
I mean, getting used to it is unendurable,
Because if we can’t eat a thing or do something with it,
Human beings get bored by almost everything eventually,
Which is why winter is such an admirable invention.

[Cass · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love you environmental poetry I love you processing of grief

[Alayna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading these words and I can’t wait to reread them. Beauty on every page, and nature. Soothing even when the subject matter isn’t. Something to love always. I was indifferent to a few but enamored with most and had to take out the thesaurus more than once (happily).

Found this on his Wiki and I couldn’t agree more: Poet Stanley Kunitz said of Hass's work, "Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element."

[ash · Rating 3 out of 5]

the only thing appealing to me about this book is the poet's nuanced way of describing colors—not unlike the work of a talented painter:

the insides of peaches
are the color of sunrise

the outside of plums
are the color of dusk

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it incredibly boring. A few sparks here and there didn’t do enough for me.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Robert Hass repeats his mission for writing: "It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us" (p. 239, "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer) and "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us" (p. 274 "The Problem of Describing Trees"). Well, good fucking job, Robert Hass, because this horrible brick of poetry completely disenchanted me.

I despise Hass's style. It's so long-winded, useless, and full of scattered thoughts. He chooses awful subject matter, like nose-picking, his mother's nipples, boring conversations between bourgeois couples, how sand dunes are formed, embarrassing memories from school, and a comparison between indigenous creation myths and bugs having sex. In the last section he gets weirdly political and writes about all the wars in the 20th and 21st century. From the 348 pages of The Apple Trees at Olema I liked only two poems plus a handful of lines. Fun fact: Hass is yet another of those "bougainvillea" writers, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't like his work.

And, as I always do with such terrible books, I've saved a collection of "worst of" for your entertainment (or, "disenchantment," as Hass would say):

"Anyway, I was besotted. In that stage, you know,
when everything about her amazed me.
One time I looked in her underwear drawer.
she had eight pairs of orange panties
and one pair that was sort of lemon yellow, none of them
very new. So that was something
to think about. What kind of woman
basically wears only orange panties."

(p.30, from "Some of David's Story").

and this entire poem called "The Museum."

and:

And the dusks were full of marsh hawks and the nights were soft
With owls, they couldn't leave the herbs alone: gnawing the roots

Of rosemary, nibbling at sage and oregano and lemon thyme.
It's too bad eglantine isn't an herb, because it's a word

I'd like to use here. Her coloring was a hybrid
Of rubbed amber and the little flare of dawn rose in the kernel

Of an almond. It's a wonder to me that I have fingertips.
The knife was very sharp. The scented rose-orange moons,

Quarter moons, of fruit fell to the cutting board
So neatly it was as if two people lived in separate cities

And walked to their respective bakeries in the rain. Her bakery
smelled better than his. The sour cloud of yeast from sourdough

Hung in the air like the odor of creation. They both bought
sliced loaves, they both walked home, they both tripped"

(p. 267-77, "A Swarm of Dawns, a Flock of Restless Noons")

and this poem called "Then Time."

Hass's poetry is way too much of a slog with little to no payoff. I wasn't excited to pick this book up. Every time I did, I'd think to myself I've read another fifty pages and there's still nothing good!?

Poems that I liked:
"In Weather" (pt. 2 only), "Dark," "Poem with a Cucumber in it."

=3/141 (2.1%) poems that I liked.

[Kathleen Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American poet Robert Hass wasn’t someone I’d taken much notice of until a Tuesday Poem friend shared ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’. It was extraordinary - not just the way the poet used words, but the thread of reasoning that moved through the poem. This was a poem about love, memory, longing (‘desire is full/of endless distances), and language itself:
.......‘the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.’

So I looked for more of Robert Hass’s work. The Apple Trees at Olema runs to 352 pages and contains a selection from five previous volumes and a generous helping of new work, so I thought it would be a good introduction and I was right. This isn’t a book to skim through. I’ve taken months and months reading carefully through the different sections, reading and thinking, reading and underlining, going backwards and forwards. Now that I’ve finished the collection I’m about to start again - this time just dipping in and out to remind myself, to go swimming in poetry that is unique and exceptional.

He has a gift for choosing images and phrases that lodge in your mind; ‘Quiver dipped the nib of his pen/into the throat of the inkwell.’ ‘The wind-chivvied water,’ ‘The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.’ ‘They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.’ ‘Where the fat green figs hung like so many scrotums/among the leaves.’ Poetry - language - is itself a kind of translation. Robert Hass writes ‘as if language were a kind of moral cloud chamber/through which the world passed and from which it emerged charged/with desire.’

Hass translates Czeslaw Milosz, as well as Japanese poetry and each poem has a depth of knowledge behind it of european and eastern traditions, history, psychology and philosophy. You’re aware of this hinterland as you read, but you don’t need to know any of it to understand the poems. Louise Gluck described his work as ‘entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and non-human nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual’.

Some of the poems are autobiographical - growing up with an alcoholic mother, the break-up of a marriage, death of a brother. But it’s the way he tells stories that impresses me most. Some of the longer poems seem to be short fiction (one of them is called Novella), the shorter ones could qualify as flash fiction - and it could be argued that they’re prose poetry - they cross the borderlines of genre.

This is a fabulous collection - my copy is already scribbled all over and covered with underlinings. Robert Hass is definitely one of the 'greats' of poetry. One of America's best.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

The self is probably an illusion
and language is the structure of illusions.
The self is beguiled, anyway,
by this engine of thought.

*

The self shuffles cards
with absurd dexterity.
The deck includes
an infinite number
of one-eyed jacks.

[Katharine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think most of his poems are about fruit and women's underpants. And/or Japan.
Proof: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
A little didactic.

[Rachel King · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite of his poems are from Field Guide, Praise, and Human Wishes.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The necessary New and Selected that has Hass's famous poems, and an interesting selection of the the others that haven't become anthology pieces. I might have chosen a few other poems from the earlier books, but it is instructive to see which poems Hass finds important. Hass has tried many different formal approaches, from the short lines of the early work, through the prose poems, to the long prosy lines influenced, I think, by his translations from Milosz. But his vision and his search for the "thisness" of the things in this world has remained powerful, purposeful, over his whole writing life. That search certainly has taken him into and through the natural world, a place where he continues to learn the names and attributes of the things with which we share this particularly space and time. He has done poems that could be considered familial confessional poems. He has written memorable love poems, and poems on the failure of love. He has entered history in his poems, confronted political realities.

Of course he has planned and thought about this, but the place where this book ends has been chosen for its power and its summary. "September, Inverness" is a short poem that describes a drive up in northern California, around Tomales Bay. As always with Hass, the images of the place are clear and sharp. But the poem ends "This is the moment when bliss is what you glimpse/From the corner of your eye, as you drive past/Running errands, and the wind comes up,/And the surface of the water glitters hard against it." That quick glimpse of possible bliss, that is what Hass's poems give us and for that I am completely grateful.

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always liked Robert Hass and have read most everything he has written starting with 'Field Guide' in 1972. Reading these new and selected poems, however, I find I have a diminished enthusiasm. Hass has a certain upper middleclass Berkeley sensibility: writing about the doings of friends and family in the natural beauty of the SF Bay Area and Northern California. But this is a chronicle of privilege, not as accessible to those who are not. It is when he allows himself to experience real emotion as in 'My Mother's Nipples' and 'Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer' and when he flashes his academic expertise that the real joy of his writing shines through. His prose still contains the voice that I would most like to guide me through the poetic brambles and his translations of Haiku and Transtromer are nonpareil.

[Luis A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Hass is one of the better contemporary American poets, and this book is proof of it where he mixes the lyrical with the prose-like style. Not all the poems have equal weight. Some are better than others when it comes to show, according to many, the true sound of poetry or poetic expression. But his best efforts are worthy of reading and attention if ones wishes to see what Hass is capable of. One of the best American writers of recent times in that genre, the poetic one.
His new and selected poems should be read not only by poetry lovers, but, too, by those who want to have an idea of poetry in America by one of his better in resent times. In the whole, this is a good collection to have by a good American poet.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sprawling and large collection of poems that explores nature, divorce, travel, translation, poetry, sex, family, philosophy, and wow everything I guess? I like the varied structure and lengths of poems, and I quite enjoyed the prose poetry as it challenges what a poem is, really. The expansiveness of the collection and the raw honesty and visceral verse made me feel like I was actually experiencing the world through the poet’s eyes... which admittedly got a little tiring, as the poet is an older white male, but interesting nonetheless. While there were very few poems that I loved in their entirety, there were so many clever and funny and beautiful lines that kept me smirking and sighing the whole way.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Robert Hass poetry is like having a warm cup of tea, early in the morning, at some cabin front porch or sunroom-just enjoying the moment. And then you hear these loud animal noises that occasionally disturb your peace or give you cause to be concerned. He lulls you in and then introduces disturbing images, scenarios and phrases that cause much dissonance and momentarily take you out of the poem. Not sure if that was his intent, but there is also an underlining tone of cruelty in some of his poems, even if they don't initially present as such.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Popsugar Reading Challenge:
Prompt: The book on your TBR list with the prettiest cover

I have a lot of books on my TBR list so I scrolled until I found the first book cover I considered to be beautiful. The poems found within the book are as beautiful as the cover. I've found a new inspiration for my writing because Robert Hass has constructed poetry out of notebook musings, journal entries, and short narrative pieces. These aren't what people think about when they think poetry.

[MacKenzie Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

His poems read like beautiful stories. Prose like, but with perfect quiet observations. I’m not sure how to write the way his words make me feel. Uplifted, but in a truthful sort of way. They seem to reveal a genuine scope of the world that is often lifted to loftier spheres by other poets.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up at a thrift shop, excited for cozy poetry. But it's not giving me cozy.
Lots of little stylistic things keep bothering me, and the poems themselves aren't doing anything for me. I'm just not enjoying this enough to justify finishing it.
Kinda disappointed ngl. 🥲

[Nick Reno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and crystal clear. I find that I really prefer poetry that is part prose, and this really scratches that itch. Pretty good for a selection totally at random off the library shelf.

[Jeff Streeby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much to see and hear in this one. And many routes to travel. This my third reading for selected favorites.

[Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second time reading this book. And it is more beautiful than I remember it to be. I feel like it might be the kind of book that ages with me. Excited to return to it again in ten years.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do love this book.

[Hayley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a million years to read this, but it was amazing and Hass is a genius and that's all I have on this matter.

[Daniel J. Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very long but enjoyable journey with this fine collection of poems.

[scrapespaghetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

july notebook

[Robert Ham · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are story poems, some simple enough, but many quite complex and detailed. Sometimes it's like listening to a conversation at another table in a restaurant and trying to figure out what it's about. The poems demand a certain level of attention, and are mostly longer than I prefer, but I found them to be very much worth the effort.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read, but want to read again. Will read again next time I get to spend some hours up in Pt. Reyes and Olema....

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first time reading the poetry of Robert Hass, and this collection of poetry draws from his previous collections Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials. Reading about Robert Hass sheds some light on the varied character and subject matter. He is respected translator, having worked with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz to translate his poems to English, as well as having translated the Japanese haiku of masters such as Bosho, Issa, and Suson. Hass is also an essayist – his book What Light Can Do, which is on my to-read list, led me to his poetry in the first place – with several books of essays and magazine columns published. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He writes about love, marriage, and divorce, and his children Leif, Kristin, and Luke, and also about his alcoholic mother and drug-addicted brother, bringing a very personal note to his work. My favorite poems in this volume are:

“Shame: An Aria” from Sun Under Wood, which begins with a person in an elevator picking his nose, when the door opens, and he is caught in the act by two elderly couples!

“Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer” also from Sun Under Wood, about the emptiness of the end of love, of divorce. He writes, “I don’t think I could have told the pain of loss/ from the pain of possibility,/ though I knew they weren’t the same thing.”

“The World as Will and Representation” from Time and Materials, a scene from Hass’s childhood, in which his father gives his (the poet’s) mother a morning dose of the drug Antabuse, which will make her sick if she drinks alcohol.

“Heroic Simile” from Praise, a play on Homeric simile.

Sometimes, a phrase or excerpt, even more than the individual poems themselves, delights me:

“There are limits to saying, / In language, what the tree did.”

“It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.”

“There are times / I wish my ignorance were/ more complete.”

“A cruel music / lingered in my mind.”

“I drew long breaths. / My wife stirred in our bed. / Joy seized me.”