Books by Robert Hass

Praise

by Robert Hass

Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass 1979's Praise, the writers second volume of poetry.

Sun Under Wood

by Robert Hass

Robert Hass demonstrates once again the unmistakable intelligence and original voice that have won him both literary acclaim and the affection of a broad general readership. Here Hass extends and deepens his ongoing explorations of nature and human history, solitude, and the bonds of children, parents, and lovers. Here his passion for apprehending experience with language--for creating experience with language--finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy. Sun Under Wood is the most impressive collection yet from one of our most accomplished poets.

Addison Street Anthology, The: Berkeley's Poetry Walk

by Robert Hass, Jessica Fisher

Berkeley is a wellspring of literary and artistic history. As a way of preserving and celebrating that history, the City of Berkley called on former poet laureate Robert Hass and award-winning artist David Lance Goines to design a series of poetry panels that have been installed in the sidewalks of Berkeley’'s thriving downtown arts and theater district. The Berkeley Poetry Walk is a unique testament to the living poetic tradition. Filled with history, poetry, and anecdote, it is a splendid introduction to the history of poetry in the city, with full commentary on each poem by Hass himself. This work makes clear the importance, passion, playfulness, and episodic looniness of one of America’'s most vibrant cities.
Discover all those who have lived in or been moved by this city: from Robert Duncan, Josephine Miles, Czeslaw Milosz, and Lyn Hejinian to Thornton Wilder, Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Rexroth, from an Ohlone Indian song fragment to poems about urban spaces, war, music, and of course... love.

The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

by Robert Hass

“No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass.”
—Atlantic Monthly

The National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees at Olema is a cause for celebration.

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Robert Hass

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.
His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surprisingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry."
Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.

A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

by Robert Hass

"Robert Hass--former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize--illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop,"--NoveList.

A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

by Robert Hass

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner, an illuminating dissection of poetic form for students, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike
A 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 poetry in traditional formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative parts of a poet’s work and processes 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—the one line haiku, the brief epigram or prayer—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 singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Kobayashi Issa and Czesław Miłosz. Begunb as a project for students of poetry, 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.

Summer Snow: New Poems

by Robert Hass

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 Olema

A 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.

Summer Snow: New Poems

by Robert Hass

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 Olema

A 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.

Human Wishes (American Poetry Series)

by Robert Hass

Poems deal with language, desire, suffering, art, human relationships, and mortality

Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry

by Robert Hass

U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass considers some of the twentiethcentury poets who bring him pleasure: Robert Lowll, JamesWright, Tomas Transtromer, Joseph Brodsky, Yvor Winters,Robert Creeley, James McMichael, Czeslaw Milosz, and others,in this, his first collection of essays. Originally published in1984, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry won theNational Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. A new collection of Robert Hass's essays will be published by Ecco in 1998.

The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass

by Edward O. Wilson, Robert Hass

A meeting of great minds at the intersection of the arts and sciences
“Enchanting. . . . The Poetic Species is a wonderful read in its entirety, short yet infinitely simulating.” —Maria Popova, Marginalian

In this shimmering conversation, 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.

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000

by Robert Hass

During his years as Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived a popular 19th-century tradition: including poetry in our daily newspapers. “Poet’s Choice” went on to appear as a nationally syndicated column across the country from 1997 to 2000. The column, which featured poems relevant to current headlines, serves as a symbol of the continuing importance of poetry in our daily lives. This collection contains well-known poets such as Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, John Ashbery, and Robert Frost, as well as emerging and translated poets such as Jaime Sabines and Czeslaw Milosz. Also included are Hass’s essays that accompanied the poems. Encapsulating a world before 9/11, this collection serves as both remembrance and reminder of a period in our history, and as a celebration of the poets whose works transcend time.

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000

by Robert Hass

During his tenure as US Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived the popular nineteenth-century tradition of including poetry in our daily newspapers. “Poet's Choice” ultimately became a nationally syndicated column appearing in dozens of papers across the country. Every week, Hass would marry poets and poetry to headlines and holidays.
Proceeding in sequence from early 1997 to the start of the millennium, we ride the rhythms of Hass's remarkable musings. From the living legends to the long-gone, Hass resurrects voices of many who might otherwise remain neglected. Nearly a hundred poets are profiled — William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, Robert Frost, Sonia Sanchez, Donald Justice, Margaret Atwood, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Michael Ondaatje, and Louis Glück all make appearances here. And along with classic works, we're introduced to a host of emerging poets and to translations of such luminaries as Yehuda Amichai, Czeslaw Milosz, and Jaime Sabines. With his assured yet unimposing words, Hass awakens our understanding of the great canon of poetry.
In his introduction, Hass observes how the columns collected here seem to encapsulate a time and world quite different from the one that developed after 9/11. And so this collection serves as both remembrance and reminder of a period in our history, and as a celebration of the poets whose poems transcend time.

Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology

by Robert Hass, Paul Ebenkamp

The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner. With an introduction from Hass and Ebenkamp, as well as detailed annotation through out to guide the reader, this wonderful collection of poems will bring together the great female writers of the modernist period as well as deconstruct the language and writing that surfaced during that period.

Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology

by Robert Hass, Paul Ebenkamp

The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner. With an introduction from Hass and Ebenkamp, as well as detailed annotation through out to guide the reader, this wonderful collection of poems will bring together the great female writers of the modernist period as well as deconstruct the language and writing that surfaced during that period.

Field Guide (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

by Robert Hass

The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence.
Stanley Kunitz, the judge of the competition, calls this year’s selection “a big, strong-hearted, earthy book, in the America epic tradition of Whitman and Neruda. Hass is a wonderfully informed young man, a waking history, with abounding affection for the natural universe, including some humans, and with an imagination that spans the whole continent, from Buffalo to the Pacific.”

Field Guide (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

by Robert Hass

The first collection of poems by Robert Hass, one of contemporary American poetry’s most celebrated and widely read voices, and the 68th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets

The winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, present sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence.

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World

by Robert Hass

Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world—with accompanying photos throughout.
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

Into The Garden: A Wedding Anthology: Poetry and Prose on Love and Marriage

by Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass

For brides and grooms who want to give their weddings new depth and meaning, two acclaimed poet-translators have gathered a stunning collection of poems and prose that will add a unique and personal dimension to the ceremony.

A Third Commonness Essays on Poetry

by Robert Hass

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times--a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some "propelling force."