Robert Hass - Böcker

Robert Hass has, for a long time, held a prominent position among the most revered of all living poets. Unlike the more difficult, cerebral poetry of writers like John Ashbery, Hass' work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world, in the smaller details of natural, human life. His poetry is graceful, humble, curious, and wise. Because he has published so little work, every new book is a major event in poetry, and this will be no exception.

Renowned for his magisterial verse, Robert Hass is also a brilliant essayist. The New York Times hailed him as a writer who is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure. Now, with What Light Can Do, Hass' first collection of essays in more than twenty-five years, the lauded author returns to and enlarges the territory of his critically acclaimed and much-loved collection Twentieth Century Pleasures, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These acute and deeply engaging essays are as much a portrait of the elegant thought processes of an unconventional and virtuoso mind as they are inquiries into their subjects, which range from meditations on how we see and treat the earth to the relationship between literature and religion, from explorations of the works of writers as diverse as Korean poet Ko Un, Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and Anton Chekhov to the ways in which photography - much like an essay-embodies a sustained act of attention.A perceptive and evocative mixture of memory, philosophical interrogation, and criticism, the essays in What Light Can Do, finely attuned to the pleasures and pains of being human, are always grounded in the beauty of the material world and its details, and in the larger political and social realities we inhabit.

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner, an illuminating dissection of poetic form and an essential book on writing craft for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alikeA Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and essayist. In it he takes up the central tension between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about formal poetry. But the more intuitive, creative parts of a poet’s work and processes—the core of creative writing—are more elusive: if the most interesting aspect of form is the shaping power of the essential, expressive gestures inside it, how do we come to a language in which to speak about form as the search for the radiant shapes— the wholeness or brokenness—we experience inside powerful works of art? In suggestive, informal “notes,” Haas thinks through the idea of a poem from its barest building blocks—from the single poetic line to foundational stanzas—to the complex villanelle and sonnet, and beyond them, to the grand forms of elegy and ode through which poets across human cultures have investigated the shapes of grieving and desiring. His approach to poetics singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Kobayashi Issa and Czeslaw Milosz. Begunb as a project for students of poetry and those in poetry MFA programs, A Little Book on Form is anything but—Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language.Robert Hass demystifies the architecture of poetry, from the inside out.Organic Form: Trace the evolution of a poem from its foundational unit—the single line—through couplets, tercets, and quatrains to understand how shape emerges from impulse.Blank Verse: Explore the unrhymed pentameter that shaped centuries of English literature, from Shakespeare’s plays to the meditative poems of Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.Free Verse: Understand the innovative potential of verse liberated from meter, with close readings of modern masters from Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams.Literary Criticism: Delve into a career’s worth of wisdom from a master poet and essayist, presented in a uniquely accessible and informal “notes” format.

A major collection of entirely new poems from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials and The Apple Trees at OlemaA new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice", imagines the posthumous narrative of 'then's' that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife. Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined post colonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves' Market". Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and resentment of post colonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto".Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other 'formless' modes, "Facts for Visitors" re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

Carol Snow's award-winning poetry has been admired and celebrated as 'work of difficult beauty' (Robert Hass), 'ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference' ("Boston Review"), teaching us 'how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith' (Jorie Graham). In this, her third volume, Snow continues to mine the language to its most mysterious depths and to explore the possibilities its meanings and mechanics hold for definition, transformation, and emotional truth. These poems place us before, and in, language - as we stand before, and in, the world. "The Seventy Prepositions" comprises three suites of poems. The first, 'Vocabulary Sentences', reflects on words and reality by taking as a formal motif the sort of sentences used to test vocabulary skills in elementary school. The poems of the second suite, 'Vantage', gather loosely around questions of perspective and perception. The closing suite finds its inspiration in the Japanese dry-landscape gardens known as karesansui, such as the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto.Here the poet approaches composition as one faces a 'miniature Zen garden', choosing and positioning words rather than stones, formally, precisely, evocatively.

Robert Hass is an American poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. 'The Apple Trees at Olema' includes work from five books - 'Field Guide', 'Praise', 'Human Wishes', 'Sun Under Wood' and 'Time and Materials' - as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas. From the beginning, his poems have seemed entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and non-human nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual. Over the years, he has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that seem to come from a sceptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived experience that a poem tries to apprehend. Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes - San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country - are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style - formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Milosz - combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch.

The Essential Haiku brings together Robert Hass's beautifully fresh translations of the three great masters of the Japanese haiku tradition: Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker, and the haiku poet most familiar to English readers; Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, a painter renowned for his visually expressive poetry; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist, whose haiku are known for their poignant or ironic wit. Each haiku master's section of the book is prefaced with an eloquent and informative introduction by Robert Hass, followed by a selection of over 100 poems and then by other poetry or prose by the poet, including journals and nature writing. Opening with Hass's superb introductory essay on haiku, the book concludes with a section devoted to Basho's writings and conversations on poetry. The seventeen-syllable haiku form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Each haiku is a meditation, a centring, a crystalline moment of realisation. Reading them has a way of bringing about calm and peace within the reader. The symbolism of the seasons and the Japanese habit of mind blend together in these poems to create an alchemy of reflection that is unsurpassed in literature. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as well as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of post-war America and Britain. Universal in its appeal, Robert Hass's The Essential Haiku is the definitive introduction to haiku and its greatest poets, and has been a bestseller in America for twenty years. 'I know that for years I didn't see how deeply personal these poems were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavour - Basho might have said "the scent" - of particular human life, because I had been told and wanted to believe that haiku were never subjective. I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Better to sink down through the level of these poems - their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the poems reflect, Basho's profound loneliness and sense of suffering, Buson's evenness of temper, his love for the materials of art and for the colour and shape of things, Issa's pathos and comedy and anger' - Robert Hass.

World Literature Today Editor's Pick "Enchanting...The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely simulating." --MARIA POPOVA, Brain Pickings In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and Poets House), Edward O. Wilson, renowned scientist and proponent of "consilience" or the unity of knowledge, finds an ardent interlocutor in Robert Hass, whose credo as United States poet laureate was "imagination makes communities." As they explore the many ways that poetry and science enhance each other, they travel from anthills to ancient Egypt and to the heights and depths of human potential. A testament to how science and the arts can join forces to educate and inspire, this book is also a passionate plea for conservation of all the planet's species. Edward O. Wilson, a biologist, naturalist, and bestselling author, has received more than 100 awards from around the world, including the Pulitzer Prize. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. Robert Hass' poetry is rooted in the landscapes of his native northern California.He has been awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He is a professor of English at University of California-Berkeley.