Description:
The poems in Robert Hass's new collection-his first to appear in a decade-are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here-San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country-in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.The… works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesaw Miosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtr_mer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris-ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every-thing else, into his poetry."Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.
Author bio:
Born in San Francisco, Calif., Robert Hass received his undergraduate degree from St. Mary's College and his masters and Ph.D. from Stanford University. After graduating, Hass wrote his first collection of poetry, Field Guide, which went on to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973. Hass's second collection, Praise, won the Williams Carlos Williams Award in 1979. Selected by the Library of Congress as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1995-96, Hass has taught writing at the University of California at Berkeley since 1989. Hass has co-translated several volumes of poetry by Nobel Laureate and fellow colleague Czeslaw Milosz and is the editor of The Essential Haiku.