|
Robert Hass
Bliss is what you glimpse
Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, won the
National Book Award a couple of weeks ago for his most recent
collection, Time and Materials. Hass has never shied away from
ambitious titles — a couple of his previous collections have
been titled Praise and Human Wishes — and his poems reflect
those ambitions, especially in Hass's continuing obsession with
discovering the startling, exact image to capture a luminous moment
in the natural world. In "State of the Planet," one of
the long, ambitious poems included in this book, the poet sees a
schoolgirl with a "red satchel on her quite straight back"
crossing a street while a windstorm blows around her. In a typical
leap, he imagines a science book in her bag, or things she might
have collected. And since family and work have brought him to our
state regularly, we even get to feel a proprietary pride in a local
image:
If she lived in Michigan or the Ukraine,
She'd find, washed up on the beach in a storm like this
Limestone fossils of Devonian coral. She could study
The faint white markings: she might have to lick the stone
To see them if the wind was drying the pale surface
Even as she held it, to bring back the picture of what life
Looked like forty million years ago: a honeycomb with mouths.
|
But as much as I love Petoskey stones, it would be wrong to leave
you with only that image of Hass's Time and Materials.
As the big title suggests, this poet is also concerned with large
philosophical questions. There is an exploration of mortality here,
grounded in the poet's life and his own aging. And Hass continues
exploring another of his preoccupations — the human tendency
toward violence. "Bush's War" is a long poem where
the current seemingly endless conflict is understood in the context
of other conflicts and atrocities. In another poem he begins with
something that sounds like a joke — "the fact that you
get an adolescent/Of the human species to do almost anything"
— but continues, "Which is why they are tromping down a
road in Fallujah/In combat gear.
.
.
/This morning and why a young woman is strapping/Twenty pounds of
explosives to her mortal body in Jerusalem.
.
.
."
But all of that, too, gives an incomplete picture of this capacious
collection of poems. There is humor here, gentle and loving. And
always he returns to the possibility of our imagination in contact
with the world. The last poem says: "This is the moment when
bliss is what you glimpse/From the corner of your eye, as you drive
past/Running errands."
Robert Hass reads from Time and Materials at Rackham Auditorium
on Saturday, December 1.
—Keith Taylor
Photo by Margaretta Mitchell
[Review published December 2007]
|
