Praise

Once upon a time, I was a naive college freshman who felt that contemporary poetry just wasn't for me: I felt that I didn't "get" modern poetry and that I just couldn't relate to it. Then, one day, I read Robert Hass's poem "Meditation at Lagunitas," and I was like, "Oh!" After that, there was no turning back. My favorite poems in this sublime collection, besides "Meditation at Lagunitas," are "Heroic Simile" and "Against Botticelli." All three are poems in which Hass masterfully combines intellectual rigor, lucid expression, wistful romanticism, muted sensuality, and an almost Euclidean reverence for form, structure, symmetry, and recursion.

This is Hass at his finest. In this work he deftly moves within and around human experience with a Rilkean penetration and tautness of line. In my view, Hass' later work labors because it attempts to emulate the vogue chattiness of current free verse poetry and doesn't adhere to the intensity he achieves in Praise. There is not disappointing poem in this book, something that many "great" poets haven't achieved in their volumes. All of these poems deserve to be reread often and serious poets should study this book to learn exactly how Hass creates his magic.This book is as good as poetry gets. By all means, buy it.

I can't imagine having not read this beautiful volume of poems. Haas is a master. His poems are holygraphic. You end up being inside them! What he does with time and space is unequaled in all of poetry. No, I'm not his mother! I'm just a totally awed reader who thinks great poetry is one of the hardest things in the world to write. Praise be to Praise!

Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass has created lyrical mastery- with a decidely Californian touch- in 1979's "Praise", the writers second volume of poetry. The book is most certainly a wildly rich, fufilling journey into what may be an admirable ideal structure. Hass uses lilting, engrossing language, wisping by like a breeze but with all of the intensity of the view through which he looks upon his powerful and immense subject matter. Of particular note is "Meditation at Lagunitas", a beautiful soliloquoy that may be the finest and most languid of our American poetic voices.