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Poet finds edge beneath the beauty
A former U.S. poet laureate seeks the foundation of things.
By John Freeman, Special to the Times
Published December 9, 2007
Carved out of the sturdiest observations, sanded to clarity, molded to the contours of lives less harried than most of us enjoy, the new collection of poetry by MacArthur "genius" fellow Robert Hass feels like fall at the end of a long summer. Here are poems about pears and glittering aspens, about hours spent deliberately. And then Hass has had enough of this autumnal pageantry. "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us," he writes in The Problem of Describing Trees, as if sick of it all. But then what? Time and Materials, which recently won the National Book Award, seems to ask itself that question over and again: If not lovemaking, or the amber shiver of trees losing leaves, what are our elemental things? Is war the seasonal ritual to which we should become accustomed as our planet's seasons merge? "Someone will always want to mobilize/Death on a massive scale for economic/Domination or revenge," Hass writes in Bush's War, an astounding poem that begins with bald political particulars and then crabwalks toward the spectacle of what wars actually do: "Sweet death, the scourer/The heaped bodies into summer fruit." During the years he composed these poems Hass served as U.S. poet laureate and wrote the Poet's Choice column for the Washington Post. This volume doesn't have the willed cohesion so common among today's poets. That's a good thing. Dickensian microportraits, minor pleasures, abound: a man with "an Adam's apple/So protuberant it's conducting a flirtation/with deformity" appears in one poem. Another has a "mouth formed by private ironies/As if he'd sat silent in too many meetings with people/He thought more powerful and less intelligent than he." These gently rewarding verses help us seek out such moments, containing all that beauty, strapping it to a form, and then reminding us of our darker tendencies, too. John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail. Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 By Robert Hass Ecco, 88 pages, $22.95
[Last modified December 6, 2007, 15:40:43]
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