Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005

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.

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. 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 p

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. 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.

I'm thrilled that Hass won it, as no one deserves it more. It's been a decade since his last book, and the contemplation of time and materials he experienced has constructed this continually delighting and surprising book, which I'd put up there with Field Guide and Praise as my three favorite books by Hass, who has become one of our most vocal ecological poets.

"Time and Materials," the new collection of poems by Robert Hass is serious and reflective, but also playful and passionate. The themes of these poems are various; sex, war, art, the planet, the relationships between men and women, and language itself are all explored by Hass. However, two of the dominate themes in the work are time and the nature of memory. Hass's examination of time and the materials of memories suggest that many of our recollections may contain more dreams and imaginations than we realize, and that over time the experiences we have, or think we have, are unintentionally revised and rescripted. In, "Mouth Slightly Open," one of the shorter poems in the collection, thought and belief tumble together to create the possibility of an experience, a waking dream that leaves the subject, an oft-repeated `you', with only the memory of a possibility. The body a yellow brilliance and a head Some orange color from a Chinese painting Dipped in sunset by the summer gods Who are also producing that twitchy shiver In the cottonwoods, less wind than river, Where the bird you thought you saw Was, whether you believe what you thought You saw or not, and then was not, had Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness That hums in you now, and is not bad Or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear. The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here. In the poem titled, "Then Time", Hass treats time as both a subject and a technique. The subjects of the poem, a man and woman, slide from the present (which becomes the past) to the future (which becomes the present), going from exhausted lovers "very busy wringing out each other's bodies" to old acquaintances having dinner, each silently reminiscing on what they were to each other and who they have become. At one point, "She asks him if he thinks about her. `Occasionally,' / He says, smiling. `And you?' `Not much,' she says, / `I think it's because we never existed inside time.'" Hass seems to be suggesting that the young are able to break free from the measured march of time to somehow live, however fleetingly, outside the constraints of the past, the present and the future of their lives. This poem is a testament to Hass's prowess as a poet. He not only manages to distill the lifetimes of two subjects, their passion and their disillusionment, down to their respective essences, but he structures the poem in a way that reveals the paradoxical nature of time. By concentrating on two brief moments separated by twenty years, Hass brings the readers attention to both the fleeting and endless nature of time. Mention must be made of the style of the poems. Hass has a love of language that manifests itself in a willingness to play, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, with syntax and semantics. A few good examples of this playfulness are the poems, "Breach and Orison," "Time and Materials," "Poet's Work," and "A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noon." In the latter poem, Ha