Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 [Paperback]

Robert Hass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

During his years as Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived a popular 19th-century tradition: including poetry in our daily newspapers. “Poet’s Choice” went on to appear as a nationally syndicated column across the country from 1997 to 2000. The column, which featured poems relevant to current headlines, serves as a symbol of the continuing importance of poetry in our daily lives. This collection contains well-known poets such as Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, John Ashbery, and Robert Frost, as well as emerging and translated poets such as Jaime Sabines and Czeslaw Milosz. Also included are Hass’s essays that accompanied the poems. Encapsulating a world before 9/11, this collection serves as both remembrance and reminder of a period in our history, and as a celebration of the poets whose works transcend time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1997, former poet laureate Hass inaugurated the now famous Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post Book World, in which he chose a poem and accompanied it with explanation or context. The goal was to make poetry more accessible to the general reader. Now all of Hass's columns are collected chronologically in a single volume. In the early columns, Hass keeps his statements short, offering mostly background for the week's poem, from standbys like Whitman and Frost, as well as favorites like Plath (about whose troubled biography he says, "I felt like I was summarizing a soap opera"), as well as poets who were unknown then and are perhaps still too little known now, like D.A. Powell (whose work "reads like a handheld camera") and Susan Wheeler. Later, longer columns range across time and space, rounding up everything from experimental writer Fanny Howe to the Serbian epic The Battle of Kossovo. Experienced poetry readers won't find surprises in Hass's good-humored, if sometimes slightly coddling, comments, but this book doubles as an unlikely anthology of poems that are easy to enjoy, and it makes a handy guide for those new to poetry and eager to experience its breadth. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"A deeply pleasurable anthology of outstanding poems . . . Hass reminds us of the importance of reading and literature, recounting the truly heroic achievement of nearly universal literacy during the nineteenth century and the hallowed place that literature then had in the pages of daily newspapers, a focus that helped make this nation strong, but which we now seem to be devaluing to an alarming degree. Hass is certainly doing his part to keep literature vital, and even the most poetry-phobic of readers will feel welcome here."

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Trade Paper Edition edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582434360
• ISBN-13: 978-1582434360
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #731,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. He attended St. Mary's College and Stanford University. His books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen volumes of Milosz's poetry, including the book-length Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, and Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000. From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Robert Hass rolls, October 25, 2007

By 

Jeff A. Berger (Bow, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 (Hardcover)

Robert Hass has a most gentle and generous intelligence. You can experience this in each one of his brief literary columns introducing a poem, poet or poetic theme. His love of language and knowledge of poetry inspires as much as it touches. I savor each small essay the way a chocolate lover would cherish an elegant truffle. His honesty cuts through sentiment and the historical aspect of each column connects me to my own past. As with any of Hass' books, I cannot recommend this one highly enough. I searched it out and bought it the day a friend graciously told me of its publication. You might say, over the years, I have become a quiet Robert Hass addict, doubly satisfied these days by the publication of his book of poems, Time and Materials.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hass was the best Poet's Choice Guy, December 30, 2007

By 

Jessica Weissman "poet and computer programmer" (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 (Hardcover)

Hass did a great job during his tenure as poet laureate, and as the first and best of the Washington Post's Poet's Choice columnists. He found interesting poets, filled in enough of their background, and made relevant choices from their work.

Even someone fairly familiar with contemporary poetry can find something new and interesting here.

5.0 out of 5 stars poems about poems, March 20, 2011

By 

Rachel Morgan - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 (Hardcover)

Few writers and poets can discuss poetry as directly, truthfully, and intelligently as Hass. A wonderful anthology that balances contemporary (for the years the articles ran) to older poems. I recommended this book to a friend telling her that Hass' writings about the poems were like poems themselves.