Customer Reviews

Sun Under Wood

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this book, Robert Hass treads close along the confessional risk line but never quite seems to slip over it. This avoidance is tricky, given the highly personal material in most poems here. (I'd define the CRL as the point at which a poet fails to generate sympathy in the reader when discussing what is posed as personal pain - truly autobiographical or not.) He manages not to trip up by the masterful use of several strategies:

1. Distraction: when approaching the kernel of pain in a poem, he mouths around it, noting with palpable wonder the beauty and strangeness of the natural world before returning to the kernel for another little gnaw. Eventually acceptance - not so much resolution, which is hard to find in this book - is the reward of rationed philosophical nibbling. In poem after poem, Nature is a necessary source of healing distraction, and occasionally so are the imagined lives of other people. What's implicit is a deep sense of trust in the process of healing, which requires time and attention, but not necessarily to the pain.

2. Fluidity: structural as well as tonal. Distracting himself and the reader when things start to sting could very well make for clunky, ungenerous verse, but his casual tone (which rarely if ever asks for pity, instead lingering over what excites his curiosity) somehow brings us along willingly. Even when the interruptions are overt ("Interrupted Meditation", "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer"), he doesn't derail. Perhaps this is because the reader has been coaxed into accepting Hass's constant shuttle between private musing and scrupulous description by

3. Beautiful, accurate language: Hass has a fine eye, and a fine ear to match. "dragonback of pine", "toss off grails of pure white idly" - the book sings often enough to singlehandedly justify the reader's attention. It's nice that Hass mostly refrains from simply treating his natural materials as springboards for hokey or artificial metaphors - as the old man says in "Interrupted Meditation", Hass doesn't excel at metaphor - but he does excel at bringing non-human life to vivid presence on the page.

This book is largely about overcoming pain - not in the sense of triumph, but in the sense of swallowing, ingesting, receiving, and transforming. The ideas aren't all that big - just big enough to be useful and pleasurable. As Hass navigates his sorrow, we're glad he invited us along.

Robert Hass's fourth book of poetry, "Sun Under Wood," shows where he's travelled from since 1979's "Praise." In this book, he's sedate and contemplative, looking at nature and relationships with the air of a man who has mellowed with time. Beautiful and sensitive, this lacks the passion of "Praise," but has a mellow charm of its own.

Hass ponders his childhood, and the childhood of the US: visions of the Franciscan priests coming to California, and bringing illness with them -- "They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing/came here with their love..." He looks back on his mother, on his father's death, and his bond with his brother in college. Not to mention "Sonnet," as a man listens lovingly to his ex-wife's voice.

But don't think that Hass only contemplates family. He also fixes his eye on nature -- weather, plants, animals, mountains, and the almost magical web that surrounds them in his writing. Even when writing a gritty piece on an airstrip, "Layover," he pauses to describe the "snowy mountains," "moose feeding along the frozen streams/snow foxes hunting ptarmigans..." His infatuation with nature peaks in the exquisite "Woods in New Jersey," and the dreamlike "Iowa City: Early April."

Good poets are remembered, while mediocre ones are usually forgotten quickly. Robert Hass is one of the former. His descriptions of love, loss and nature are striking and beautiful, and in that "Sun Under Wood" is not a change. It's an evolution -- rather than the fire and passion of his earlier works, this is a quieter, meditative collection.

The peak of his writing in "Sun Under Wood" is "English: An Ode," an apparent tribute to the power of words. It seems fragmented even for free-style poetry, but as it's read it makes more and more sense -- it explores words, their roots, their meanings, and their evocations, only to end on a distinctly romantic note. It also seems quite appropriate, since his poetry is so evocative. Without having to use dramatic words, Hass brings to mind snowy woods, noisy tarmacs, a tearful eye or a creek fringed by fronds.

Hass's writing has changed over time, and "Sun Under Wood" is a polished, contemplative collection of beautiful poetry. Highly recommended.

The review from 'a reader' is a common tragedy. Hass, like any maturing master has found his happiness in acceptance. There is no resignation or distance in the work, it is deeply intimate and passionate. However, it is decidedly lacking in the immature rebellion against human reality. That rebellion relies on dualistic constructions: good experience vs. bad experience, good vs. evil, etc. Nature, of which humanity IS, can provide all the examples for finding our place in our world, no matter the pleasure or displeasure of our daily experiences. "nature stuff"--the very expression is absurd, its flavor indicative of the disconnection humankind lives with by choice.

This book is simply wonderful, cover to cover. Hass creates a long ignored need for peaceful contemplation of the common ignorance of the richness of life we move too quickly past, discard and unconsciously dismiss as unimportant.

Amazing imagery, flowing rhythm, new and precise 'witnessing' of nature and nature's meaning along with human sorrow. It gets uncomfortable, the way great poetry should, and yet Hass resolves the 'disenchantment' is very beautiful ways.

Highly recommended.

Hass doesn't cross "The Confessional Risk Line" as Tuor puts it because he's a great writer. Lesser writers tell us how they feel. Great writers show us how we feel. More personal opinion: As I read Sun Under Wood, I had to set it down every few minutes to jot down notes for other projects because it's one of those books that set the gears in your head all spinning away toward different ends. A good thing when you need to write.

Lyrical, fluid, spot-on. A small prize.

"A Reader" says this is "More nature stuff," and I always get bristly when I hear that. "More nature stuff" sounds a bit reductive and condescending, don't you think? "A Reader" goes on to say that Hass "seems more resigned than before as to what life brings and is not fighting for happiness." Well. I don't think that writing a book of poems qualifies as resignation.

"I had the idea that the world's so full of pain / it must sometimes make a kind of singing. / And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps-- / First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing."

What to say of someone for/of whom so much has been said? In Sun Under Wood Haas' subjects are neither pregnancy nor egg, but the film of both: shell & amniotic fluid, full of a delicate exigency. Animals haunt these pages with a sad accuracy, their eyes pointers on a blackboard-"Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was / writing at the kitchen table, / Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled / defiant terror, like a thing with no choices." Dragonflies "can't wound each other the way we do. / They don't go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger, / kill with it, smear it on everything."

I sense in this book not so much an excavation of experience, or a symbol-seeking in nature (as he himself is conscious of in the opening poem, "Happiness," where a small flock of tundra swans "symbolize mystery, I suppose"), but a serious meditation on the forces (including people themselves) that give & take away-both "what seems / the entire vocabulary of resignation" and "a various blossoming." As I read, I kept thinking that I had come upon the pivotal poem-My Mother's Nipples, Faint Music, Shame: An Aria-but (as this list is a dollop) I kept coming upon another fulcrum, each its own orchestra & cell. Haas bring to mind [& body] pain, loss, desire in a way that feels truthfully complex-"small droplets in the sheets of the body's shuddering late-night / loneliness," and elsewhere, "underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering."

There is a lovely oddity in the language, where "the raccoon-universe" takes place. The details (and description of) glisten: an elevator as a "commodious aluminum group coffin," "a room full of bright plastics," "the heavy sweet smell of mock orange," and yet nothing is so evident to me in this book as worldwide, personnarrow cruelty and loss. Read this book, where even "Notes" are poem enough. "It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us."

More nature stuff than I remember from "Praise," which I rarely understand the point of. It seems an overly romantic view of the world. Whereas in "Praise" he was a young man in the midst of life, here he has stepped back away from it and is commenting on it from a distance. He seems more resigned than before as to what life brings and is not fighting for happiness. I guess it's the difference between Praising life for whatever it brings and being a sun under wood!

Good things:

There is an amazing transcription from Frida Kahlo.

He also can get more into different characters that are not him, than I remember him doing in "Praise," which is the only other book of his I have read.