Books

"I was in the daze of writing poems," is Robert Hass' take on himself as he was in 1973. That was the year the Californian won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his first book, Field Guide. The Yale Series was so much an East Coast prestige that the clerk at San Francisco's City Lights bookstore was not impressed. "That's too bad," he said. "You're really a pretty good poet."

Mr. Hass has since been poet laureate of the United States; originator of the popular "Poet's Choice" syndicated newspaper column; translator of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and of Japanese haiku; recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship; winner of two National Book Critics Circle Awards; author of fine criticism; and, thank goodness, still in the daze of writing poems and bringing forth collections of them. Time and Materials is his fifth.

"Mouth Slightly Open" is glorious and strange as it captures a moment of the natural world. Mr. Hass casts the words at us in breathtaking arrangement until we are caught in its spell:

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 a little 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.

This new book, like his first, has a war to deal with. "Bush's War," he tells us he typed at the top of a sheet of white paper,

"Having some dim intuition of a poem / Made luminous by reason that would, / Though I did not have them at hand, / Set the facts out in an orderly way." But the poem goes elsewhere, to Berlin at the end of the 20th century, its streets full of the sensory pleasures of a northern spring: thrushes, flowering chestnuts, birch tassels, white asparagus and the odor of lilacs everywhere. As Berlin's nightingales sing "at the first, subtlest, / Darkening of dusk, it is a trick of the mind / That the past seems just ahead of us." We are shunted through the violence and atrocities of history and asked, "What good is indignation to the dead? / Or our mild forms of rational resistance?"

There are 44 worth-waiting-for poems in this first book in 10 years. Poems concerned with art, environment, politics, history, language and desire. In luscious black-and-white there's "Old Movie With the Sound Turned Off" with hatcheck girl, cigarette girl, gangster in a camel-hair coat and singer who "shoots the gangster just when he thinks he's been delivered / from a nemesis involving his brother, the district attorney."

"And look! I have rediscovered / the sweetness and the immortality of art," Mr. Hass says about watching the movie. Take that ironically or profoundly. This wonderful poet is always both.

Poet Isabel Nathaniel is the author of The Dominion of Lights, which won the Texas Institute of Letters award for Best Book of Poetry.

Poems 1997-2005

Robert Hass

(Ecco/HarperCollins, $22.95)

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