Sun Under Wood

The review from 'a reader' is a common tragedy. Hass, like any maturing master has found his happiness in acceptance. There is no resignation or distance in the work, it is deeply intimate and passionate. However, it is decidedly lacking in the immature rebellion against human reality. That rebellion relies on dualistic constructions: good experience vs. bad experience, good vs. evil, etc. Nature, of which humanity IS, can provide all the examples for finding our place in our world, no matter the pleasure or displeasure of our daily experiences. "nature stuff"--the very expression is absurd, its flavor indicative of the disconnection humankind lives with by choice. This book is simply wonderful, cover to cover. Hass creates a long ignored need for peaceful contemplation of the common ignorance of the richness of life we move too quickly past, discard and unconsciously dismiss as unimportant. Amazing imagery, flowing rhythm, new and precise 'witnessing' of nature and nature's meaning along with human sorrow. It gets uncomfortable, the way great poetry should, and yet Hass resolves the 'disenchantment' is very beautiful ways. Highly recommended.

What to say of someone for/of whom so much has been said? In Sun Under Wood Haas' subjects are neither pregnancy nor egg, but the film of both: shell & amniotic fluid, full of a delicate exigency. Animals haunt these pages with a sad accuracy, their eyes pointers on a blackboard-"Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was / writing at the kitchen table, / Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled / defiant terror, like a thing with no choices." Dragonflies "can't wound each other the way we do. / They don't go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger, / kill with it, smear it on everything." I sense in this book not so much an excavation of experience, or a symbol-seeking in nature (as he himself is conscious of in the opening poem, "Happiness," where a small flock of tundra swans "symbolize mystery, I suppose"), but a serious meditation on the forces (including people themselves) that give & take away-both "what seems / the entire vocabulary of resignation" and "a various blossoming." As I read, I kept thinking that I had come upon the pivotal poem-My Mother's Nipples, Faint Music, Shame: An Aria-but (as this list is a dollop) I kept coming upon another fulcrum, each its own orchestra & cell. Haas bring to mind [ & body] pain, loss, desire in a way that feels truthfully complex-"small droplets in the sheets of the body's shuddering late-night / loneliness," and elsewhere, "underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering." There is a lovely oddity in the language, where "the raccoon-universe" takes place. The details (and description of) glisten: an elevator as a "commodious aluminum group coffin," "a room full of bright plastics," "the heavy sweet smell of mock orange," and yet nothing is so evident to me in this book as worldwide, personnarrow cruelty and loss. Read this book, where even "Notes" are poem enough. "It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us."

Hass doesn't cross "The Confessional Risk Line" as Tuor puts it because he's a great writer. Lesser writers tell us how they feel. Great writers show us how we feel. More personal opinion: As I read Sun Under Wood, I had to set it down every few minutes to jot down notes for other projects because it's one of those books that set the gears in your head all spinning away toward different ends. A good thing when you need to write. Lyrical, fluid, spot-on. A small prize. "A Reader" says this is "More nature stuff," and I always get bristly when I hear that. "More nature stuff" sounds a bit reductive and condescending, don't you think? "A Reader" goes on to say that Hass "seems more resigned than before as to what life brings and is not fighting for happiness." Well. I don't think that writing a book of poems qualifies as resignation. "I had the idea that the world's so full of pain / it must sometimes make a kind of singing. / And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps-- / First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing."