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0 of 3 members found this review helpful.Why the fuss?
“I remember being surprised, when this book first came out, to run into reviews of it everywhere - in all the familiar places and also where poetry is seldom reviewed. So obviously the name has a lot of cachet. But it's the poems that matter, and I'm sad to report that the poems are very tired.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-05-13.
The characteristic Hass poem - longish over a few pages, with longish lines of four to five beats, in a cultured tone, on the theme of the sadness or futility of knowing - makes its regular appearance here. But in between there are also very short poems that are new for Hass, and signal (the poems continually hint at it, though they never outright say it) an artistic crisis resulting in the need to experiment in novel forms.
When Hass celebrates sensuality, the guilt in his being is palpable. When he updates his politics, trading the demise of Europe for the demise of modern America, I want to object: But sir, who pays you? I find academic critiques of industrialism/militarism/capitalism incredibly annoying - because as here, they perpetuate the dishonesty, and offer nothing but half-statements, vague despair and foreboding.
One of best poems here is one of the very shortest: In all the mountains / Stillness; / In the treetops / Not a breath of wind. / The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too. (The poem is called "After Goethe.")” -
Stunning
“This is simply astonishing poetry;Hass is,without question,the finest poet writing today in the United States.His work is elegant,fearless and humane.Whole passages are touched by genius,especially when he writes-urgently - of the madness of war. No historian or statesman has ever placed the multiple holocausts of the twentieth century in more clear-eyed perspective than does Hass in his poetic forms.In April,this book received the Pulitzer Prize for 2008. When today's poetry is catalogued and discussed in fifty years,this poet will be regarded as a laureate.Set aside your copies of past masters.Here is poetry that sacrifices none of the richness or musicality of the English language,while speaking to the present day in all its' maddening ambiguity.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-07-23. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
The Pleasure of Reading Robert Hass
“If I only had to buy one book of poetry this year, it would be "Time And Materials" by Robert Hass. I say this because Hass is poet who can combine soulful meditation about his physical existence in a world surrounded by danger from humanity's destructive forces, to his own private personal inner thoughts of joy and sorrow from having lived his life between that hostile world and the world that creates art.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-07-22.
I like to think that if Baudelaire were born and raised in San Francisco in the 1950s, he'd write poems like Robert Hass, poems that have this double edge of horror and ecstasy, this fear and wonder at the movement of time, this repulsion and this attraction to nature, to beauty, to the body--those "evil flowers."
Because, as Hass writes in my favorite poem from this collection, "Art And Life," a poem that looks like prose but that reads like verse:
There is nothing less ambivalent than animal attention
And so you honor it, admire it even, that her attention,
Turned away from you, is so alive, and you are melancholy
Nevertheless. It is best, of course, to be the one engaged
And being thought of, to be the pouring of the milk.
And what amazes me is that Hass's meditation on life as art puts the reader into the mind of the poet wishing he were part of the painting, inside the act of artistic creation, inside a human wish to be part of something so simple, a fluid gesture of time caught at the threshold, a woman pouring milk in Vermeer's famous painting.
Hass continues his meditation in this poem to take in his surroundings, the world that rubs up against this painterly light-filled, time-frozen world of Vermeer, to place himself like Prufrock in a public space where people go about their waking lives while the poet dreams and imagines who the caretakers of this painting are, the plain people eating in the museum cafeteria who reveal their vulnerability:
...I wondered
Who the restorer was. The blondish young woman
In the boxy, expensive Japanese coat picking at a dish
Of cottage cheese--cottage cheese and a pastry? ...
...She seems to be a person
Who has counted up the cost and decided what to settle for.
It's in the way her soft, abstracted mouth
Receives the bits of bread and the placid sugars.
Or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,
Brown buckskin shoes like the place where dust and sunset
Meet and disappear...
The genius of Hass, like the genius of Vermeer, is in his ability to create metaphor that captures human fraility and emotion in his descriptions of small, animal gestures like a woman's hands breaking off pieces of bread, or a man's pair of sad shoes. It is in those small gestures that we all live. Hass has been sketching those fine details ever since his first book of poems, "Field Guide" was published almost forty years ago. He is a poet that I return to over and over again because I gain from reading him a better sense of my own art of living.
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haas does it again
“Robert Haas, former poet laureate USA, has a problem: he doesn't write enough. But then that may be our problem. His readership hangs on every poem, every word in every poem. And they (WE, US)WANT MORE.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-06-11.
Not high flown nor lofty, his verse covers his chosen terrain, ordinary things from the ground-view vantage point. It takes us over the moguls and the pot holes with enough bounce that we know these rough spots are there but we're not jolted skyward out of our seats.
Obscurantism has had its day with the passing last century's lords of the obscure, Pound, Eliot, Stevens and their ilk.
Haas, Collins, are the 'ilks' we clamor for today.
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1 of 3 members found this review helpful.
A beautiful book
“Embrace The Light; a women's story through poetry to touch your heartPoetry which will inspire the heart, mind and soul”
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-06-11.
