Robert Hass's Sun Under Wood, his fourth poetry collection in 25 years and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, appeared in the middle of his high-profile stint as poet laureate of the United States. Putting into practice the ars poetica of his Twentieth Century Pleasures essays, these poems gain altitude through association with each other, especially the clever division of labor between "Layover" and "Notes on 'Layover.'" The concerns of the book expand and contract, offering up such memorable passages as the third stanza of "Our Lady of the Snows": Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother's closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.
Aside from sounding an unexpected rhyme, this "navigable sorrow" betrays Hass as a poet of sensibility. What elevates him from preciousness is a powerful need to engage and indulge--to "navigate"--memories of his alcoholic mother and his own painful divorce. Sun Under Wood, in other words, is the book Robert Lowell would have written had he grown up in California. The raccoon Hass confronts in "Iowa City: Early April" seems to have stepped right out of Lowell's "Skunk Hour," but instead of moaning, "I myself am hell ... nobody's here," Hass muses, "That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart, / ...And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing...." Such universal emotions are hard to find words for, but throughout Sun Under WoodHass speaks with a clear, disturbing, and urgent voice. --Edward Skoog

From Publishers Weekly
Hass is Poet Laureate of the United States, a position through which he has worked to enlarge the cultural presence of poetry. Much the same ends are served in his new collection, which contains a remarkable range of themes and styles, all of them generous-hearted and friendly of access. Although Hass's work can be positioned somewhere between the rural lyricism of William Stafford and the precise, Zen-like economies of Gary Snyder, he seems, most of all, a California poet. There is a distinctive ease and optimism to his poetic attentions, and his voice is as comfortable musing about ethnicity as it is detailing marital peccadilloes or extolling the allure of "my mother's nipples." In this, his first volume since 1989's Human Wishes, Hass shows that he can write a perfect sonnet ("Sonnet"), but seems to revel more in an idiosyncratic free-form of blank verse broken by sharp apercus. Hass is careful not to allow his poems to be reducible or predictable. Most remarkable in this collection is "Faint Music," in which the poet attempts "a poem about grace," and then wanders through a meditation on self-love, an anecdote about a failed suicide, an infidelity and porch sounds at night. In the end, the poet concludes, "the sequence helps, as much as order helps?/ First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing." Such quirky, imaginative incarnations of grace are all we need ask of a poet or a laureate. 20,000, first printing. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Like Robert Frost, Gary Synder, and the haiku masters before them, current U.S. Poet Laureate Hass (The Essential Haiku, Ecco, 1995) discerns in nature's random blossomings and processes a "beauty unconscious of itself," all the more attractive for its autonomy. Combining an almost Zen tranquility of expression with a naturalist's eye ("Creekstones practicing the mild yoga of becoming smooth."), Hass seems engaged in "an activity of incessant discovery" whether he's meditating on a surprised raccoon, the circumstances surrounding a divorce, or a parent's debilitating alcoholism. "It is good sometimes," he writes coyly, "that poetry should disenchant us," an ironic observation given his special?and subversive?talent for disenchanting the reader at the moment of deepest enchantment, knowing that "We live half our lives/ in fantasy, and words." Though he often strives for a lyricist's concision, Hass will let his poems wash widely into prose ("My Mother's Nipples") if necessary, as if the urgency of his thought refuses containment. For the fourth time, he has given us a disarming, disturbing, memorable book of poems. Recommended for all collections.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


"No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass."

The New Yorker
"The poems in Hass's fourth collection -artfully assembled from prose, epigram, conversation, and free verse--prove both meditative and emotional. Hass is able to aestheticize loss without succumbing to either nostalgia or self-consciousness.... His new poems are plangent and ecstatic."

The New York Times Book Review, Michael Hofmann
It has always been Mr. Hass's aim to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry. He presents himself as lover, husband, father, thinker, reader, outdoorsman, confidant ... He sings a kind of Californian omni-valence: family, friends, conversations, anecdote, history, reading, wild animals and birds, his beloved flowers and grasses are all strummed in the arpeggios of the poems.

From Booklist
Poet laureate Hass is continuing the effort of his predecessors, Rita Dove and Joseph Brodsky, to bring poetry back into the realm of everyday life by writing a weekly column for the Washington Post and sponsoring many programs and projects. A true democrat, Hass values education, the power of language, and the most ordinary aspects of life: the warmth of the sun, the call of a bird, love and even its loss, and all the oddities of consciousness. Hass' firm grounding in life is expressed in his unusually anecdotal, conversational, and stylistically prosy poetry. He weaves in dialogue, comments on his activities during the writing of a poem, and even offers variations on two poems in the form of "Notes," but make no mistake, each and every word counts as it must in poetry, and Hass' perceptions into the nature of emotions are at once as fine as gossamer and as resilient as vines. He is a giving, honest, sensual, moody, and plainspoken poet, a tireless bard who sings of our sorrows and joys, our perversities and strengths. Donna Seaman

Los Angeles Times
"Sun Under Wood is Hass at his best. It is a book to reread, always with the lucky sense of walking through a meadow with a friend, deep in the best kind of exchange."

Book Description
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.

About the Author
Robert Hass is the author of two earlier collections of poems, Field Guide and Praise, and a book of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures. He has also collaborated with Czeslaw Milosz on the translation of his poems, most recently Collected Poems. His many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellowship and the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He has taught for many years at St. Mary's College of California and is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Sun Under Wood extends and deepens Hass's 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. Yet Hass's most seductive and indelible lyrics reside in an exquisitely fragile moment: there is a dark undercurrent rising in this text, an increasingly acute sense of mortality in a world "so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Hass is Poet Laureate of the United States, a position through which he has worked to enlarge the cultural presence of poetry. Much the same ends are served in his new collection, which contains a remarkable range of themes and styles, all of them generous-hearted and friendly of access. Although Hass's work can be positioned somewhere between the rural lyricism of William Stafford and the precise, Zen-like economies of Gary Snyder, he seems, most of all, a California poet. There is a distinctive ease and optimism to his poetic attentions, and his voice is as comfortable musing about ethnicity as it is detailing marital peccadilloes or extolling the allure of "my mother's nipples." In this, his first volume since 1989's Human Wishes, Hass shows that he can write a perfect sonnet ("Sonnet"), but seems to revel more in an idiosyncratic free-form of blank verse broken by sharp apercus. Hass is careful not to allow his poems to be reducible or predictable. Most remarkable in this collection is "Faint Music," in which the poet attempts "a poem about grace," and then wanders through a meditation on self-love, an anecdote about a failed suicide, an infidelity and porch sounds at night. In the end, the poet concludes, "the sequence helps, as much as order helps/ First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing." Such quirky, imaginative incarnations of grace are all we need ask of a poet or a laureate. 20,000, first printing. (Oct.)

Library Journal