Word: hass
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When he details the mechanisms of the natural world, Hass attempts to draw connections between nature and the world of human emotion. In the poem “Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey” Hass opens by precisely describing the formation of a dune: “twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. On the leeward side / the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees...
...poem continues, Hass widens the scope of his lens. The dune moves, he writes, in a “grand slow march / across the earth’s surface,” which “has an external counterpart in the scouring / movement of glaciers.” As he explores the layers of fractals in nature, the poet sees similar shapes and motion in the patterns of human feelings. He notices “The movement of grief / which has something in it of the desert’s bareness / and of its distances...
...account of a man named David as he falls in and out of love with his former lover. By specifying the name of this character and by including details throughout the poem, such as the specific kind of wines David discusses with his lover’s father, Hass brings to life what might otherwise be a somewhat mundane love story...
...party, she said, / ‘I have an English father and an American mother.../ and at some point I had to choose, so I moved back to London and became the sort of person / who says puh-son instead of purr-son.” Hass carefully details the small stories of each of the characters who appear throughout his poems. This ability to create a convincing narrative seems to be, according to Hass, important for poets. After all, in “August Notebooks: A Death,” he claims that “the most reliable...
...segments selected from his previous collections, its slightly rougher quality helps the poet present his work as if he were giving his reader a privileged view into his private journals. The new poems of “The Apple Trees at Olema” show that Robert Hass continues to write verse that approaches both the natural and the human world with a close, scientific eye. This new collection is a celebration of the beauty he finds in the order of both human and non-human life...