The Apple Trees at Olema includes work from Robert Hass's first
five books--Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and
Time and Materials--as well as a substantial gathering of new
poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form
of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of
summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate
on personal relations in a violent world and read like small,
luminous novellas.
From the beginning, his poems have seemed entirely his own: a
complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to
human and nonhuman nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a
syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that
are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual. Over the years, he
has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that
seem to come from a skeptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the
artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived
experience that a poem tries to apprehend.
Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His
familiar landscapes--San Francisco, the northern California coast,
the Sierra high country--are vividly alive in his work. His themes
include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life
between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent
limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as
fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time.
His style--formed in part by American modernism, in part by his
long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters
and Czeslaw Milosz--combines intimacy of address, a quick
intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense
sensual vividness, and a light touch. It has made him immensely
readable and his work widely admired.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
