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Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005

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Publisher: Ecco
List Price: $22.95
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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.

DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: 2007-10-01
Publisher: Ecco
Release Date: 2007-10-09
Studio: Ecco


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Failure
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000
• New Selected Poems
• Tree of Smoke: A Novel


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Pleasure of Reading Robert Hass
Comment: 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 poet that I return to over and over again because I gain from reading him a better sense of my own art of living.


Customer Rating:
Summary: haas does it again
Comment: 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.




Customer Rating:
Summary: A beautiful book
Comment: Embrace The Light; a women's story through poetry to touch your heartPoetry which will inspire the heart, mind and soul
Customer Rating:
Summary: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Comment: 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.

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