Summer Snow

by Robert Hass

Overview

A major collection of entirely new poems from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials and The Apple Trees at Olema

A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062950024
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,053,193
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

First Poem 1

Nature Notes in the Morning 3

Sprezzatura 7

Stanzas for a Sierra Morning 9

Patches of Snow in July 11

Death in Infancy 11

Death in Childhood 12

Death in Adolescence 13

Those Who Die in Their Twenties 17

Planh or Dirge for the Ones Who Die in Their Thirties 19

Harvest: Those Who Die Early in Their Middle Years 21

Second Person 23

Three Old Men 29

Pablo Neruda: Only Death 33

To Be Accompanied by Flute and Zither 37

Abbott's Lagoon: October 39

Christmas in August 41

An Argument About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain 43

Cymbeline 49

The Archaeology of Plenty 51

Poem Not an Elegy in a Season of Elegies 55

The Poet at Nine 59

A Person Should 61

Smoking in Heaven 63

Dream in the Summer of My Seventy-Third Year 65

Los Angeles: An Analysis 69

Okefenokee: A Story 71

For Cecil, After Reading Ohio Railroads 73

Jersey Train 75

Sunglasses Billboard in Termini Station 77

Three Dreams About Buildings 79

Pertinent Divagations Toward an Ode to Inuit Carvers 81

Three Propositions About a Subject Still to Be Determined 85

February Notebook: The Rains 89

Summer Storm in the Sierra 95

Hotel Room 97

Large Bouquet of Summer Flowers, or Allegory of the Imagination 99

Nature Notes 2 103

Another Bouquet of Summer Flowers, or Allegory of Mortality 107

John Muir, a Dream, a Waterfall, a Mountain Ash 109

After Xue Di 113

Dancing 117

The Creech Notebook 121

1 A Basque Restaurant in Bakersfield 121

2 A Straight Shot to Vegas 123

3 Drones in the Desert 125

4 Jailbird Priests 132

Seoul Notebook

1 First Day of the Conference on Peace 137

2 Mouths of Babes 141

Two Translations from Anglo-Saxon 145

1 The Battle at Brunanburh 145

2 The Death of Alfred; from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 147

What the Modernists Wrote About: An Informal Survey 151

A Talk at Sewanee 155

The Four Eternities, or the Grandfather's Tale 159

Silence 161

The Sixth Sheikh's Sheep's Sick 163

Montale's Notebooks 165

Small Act of Homage 169

Notes on the Notion of a Boundless Poetics 171

Notes 175

Acknowledgments 177

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/21/2019

In this ruminative, endlessly clever book, Pulitzer Prize–winner Hass (The Apple Trees at Olema) turns his eye toward nature, love, and even drone strikes, as, when chronicling a visit to a Las Vegas Air Force base for a protest, he juxtaposes the specter of commerce at a nearby casino with headlines detailing drone-related deaths in the Middle East. Though death may be the prevailing theme, these poems are far from dirges, as images of his Northern California environs shimmer with life: “you can almost hear the earth sigh/ As it sucks up the rain.” Hass experiments with form, vacillating between long and short lines, stanzas and long unbroken blocks of verse. His language is lofty but accessible, as in “The Archaeology of Plenty,” a loose, associative riff about finding meaning in a callous and capricious world, in which the poet argues for poetry as a cure for existential dread: “reach into your heavy waking,/ The metaphysical nausea that being in your life,/ With its bearing and its strife, its stiffs,/ Its stuff, seems to have produced in you,/ Reduced you to, and make something with a pleasing,/ Or teasing, ring to it.” Hass is a rarity, a poet’s poet and a reader’s poet who, with this newest endeavor, bestows a precious gift to his audience. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

It all sounds like mastery, like singular virtuosity attained on a very popular instrument — common American speech.” — New York Times Book Review

"Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He’s an open book; but he’s also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on." — New Yorker

From the Publisher

It all sounds like mastery, like singular virtuosity attained on a very popular instrument — common American speech.

New York Times Book Review

"Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He’s an open book; but he’s also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on."

New Yorker

"Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He’s an open book; but he’s also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on."

New Yorker

04/01/2020

In "Patches of Snow in July," former U.S. Poet Laureate Hass sets up the image that is central to this poem and to the collection: "the way the white patches of snow in the saddles of bare rock between the/ massive peaks glittered in the sun undid me." As he remembers seeing leftover bits of melting snow in the Sierra Mountains, he associates the memory with various people who are no longer alive with the poem, then suggests how he was moved ("undone") by the persons he is elegizing. Nearly all of these poems refer to someone Hass has known personally or professionally, with one of the most evocative poems referring to his parents. Hass infuses his work with numerous references to nature, which tend to fill out the portrait of the deceased: "death's song is the color of wet violets." Although there are a few haikulike poems, most of the collection is composed of longer prose poems. VERDICT Overall, this collection of elegies has a pleasing, conversational tone (despite the morbidity of its subject), as if Hass is reading nature not to glean a message but to hear and see what nature has to say. For all libraries.—C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

Library Journal