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Rating:  - Never received
I can't say whether or not Bob Hass' recent book is a winner because I ordered the book through Amazon and I never received it. On that basis I must give both the book dealer and Amazon an F in terms of service and fulfilling orders. Of Hass I'll reserve my judgment until I've had a chance to read his latest book.
Lee Perron
Rating:  - The Substance of Memory
"Time and Materials," the new collection of poems by Robert Hass is serious and reflective, but also playful and passionate. The themes of these poems are various; sex, war, art, the planet, the relationships between men and women, and language itself are all explored by Hass.
However, two of the dominate themes in the work are time and the nature of memory. Hass's examination of time and the materials of memories suggest that many of our recollections may contain more dreams and imaginations than we realize, and that over time the experiences we have, or think we have, are unintentionally revised and rescripted.
In, "Mouth Slightly Open," one of the shorter poems in the collection, thought and belief tumble together to create the possibility of an experience, a waking dream that leaves the subject, an oft-repeated `you', with only the memory of a possibility.
The body a yellow brilliance and a head
Some orange color from a Chinese painting
Dipped in sunset by the summer gods
Who are also producing that twitchy shiver
In the cottonwoods, less wind than river,
Where the bird you thought you saw
Was, whether you believe what you thought
You saw or not, and then was not, had
Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness
That hums in you now, and is not bad
Or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear.
The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.
In the poem titled, "Then Time", Hass treats time as both a subject and a technique. The subjects of the poem, a man and woman, slide from the present (which becomes the past) to the future (which becomes the present), going from exhausted lovers "very busy wringing out each other's bodies" to old acquaintances having dinner, each silently reminiscing on what they were to each other and who they have become. At one point, "She asks him if he thinks about her. `Occasionally,' / He says, smiling. `And you?' `Not much,' she says, / `I think it's because we never existed inside time.'" Hass seems to be suggesting that the young are able to break free from the measured march of time to somehow live, however fleetingly, outside the constraints of the past, the present and the future of their lives.
This poem is a testament to Hass's prowess as a poet. He not only manages to distill the lifetimes of two subjects, their passion and their disillusionment, down to their respective essences, but he structures the poem in a way that reveals the paradoxical nature of time. By concentrating on two brief moments separated by twenty years, Hass brings the readers attention to both the fleeting and endless nature of time.
Mention must be made of the style of the poems. Hass has a love of language that manifests itself in a willingness to play, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, with syntax and semantics. A few good examples of this playfulness are the poems, "Breach and Orison," "Time and Materials," "Poet's Work," and "A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noon." In the latter poem, Hass even points out that, "The syntax is a little haywire there."
When he is not playing with the syntax or semantics of the English language, Hass seems to have revitalized the run-on sentence. This phenomenon can be found in the poem above, "Mouth Slightly Open." The first eleven lines of the poem are one sentence! Nails on a chalkboard for grammarians, but Hass changes these once egregious grammatical errors into breathtaking lines that work to quickly pull the reader through the poems. Many of these poems are like wild horses at full gallop, beautiful, powerful and unrestrained, and Hass has offered the reins to his readers. So take them up. This slim volume of poetry will not disappoint.
Rating:  - Hass Has Sass
Robert Hass's most recent collection of poems "Time and Materials" is perhaps his most self-reflective collection to date. Its contents appear as a long series of gentle solicitations. They appeal directly to the reader's thoughts and emotions and guide them toward Hass's own unique brand of enlightened despair. No poem consists of just one single idea or viewpoint but an entire host of provisional positions that all tenderly amend one another as the poem goes on. What one finds is that the words all begin to slowly congeal into a warm-hearted gesture from the poet to the reader that says "sure I might be a MacArthur Fellow and former Poet Laureate of the United States, but I'm still just as lonely and ignorant as you." The effect is a level of personal intimacy between writer and reader that is rare even for poetry.
The overall sentiment is one of cautious contentment; cautious because it is a contentment which is plagued with the paradoxical desire to be shared. This longing for a deeper communion is felt throughout the book and it has the effect of fixing any final contentment in a sort of permanent suspension. It is as if a separation between the true emotion and the expression of that emotion is inconceivable for Hass. In "Time and Materials" a feeling is only as authentic as its communication and the result is poetry written in search of an emotion as much as in expression of it. This search places the writer and the reader in a similar position to one another. They find themselves parsing the same lines; searching the same thoughts; chasing after the same elusive understanding. Hass writes in search of this communion because he knows that we read out of the same pursuit. What he expresses we interpret and what he interprets within himself our imagined impressions can provide expression for. This can help explain why there is a continual shift away from the page and into the projected mind of the reader on the part of Hass. It also accounts for the high level of intimacy mentioned earlier.
The broad scope of the poetry in this book makes any generalizing statements about it nearly impossible. The subjects include everything from consciousness, to economics, to cucumbers; and each of these topics is handled by Hass with an equally startling degree of intensity. Hass manages to treat every event in human experience as a potentially revolutionary one. However, unlike many poets, Hass is careful to keep this revolution in a state of pure potentiality rather than exhaust it in some illusory actualization. This is because it is here, when an idea is still in its infancy, that Hass shows his greatest fascination with it. The beauty is in the inception of the idea, not its fulfillment. Hass presents this beauty by cataloguing his own rapidly evolving relationship towards it.
Much of this book deals directly with the art of writing poetry. In "Time and Materials" the poem becomes the object as much as the medium. However, Hass is never content to let the significance of a piece end here. A poem that begins with a metaphor for literature soon reveals that literature itself should also be seen as a metaphor for something else. What often happens is that, as a poem grows increasingly self-reflexive, it inevitably exposes itself to the same metaphorization that any other poetical subject would undergo. As this happens, the traditional roles of tenor and vehicle are effectively broken-down and what remains in their place is a much more reciprocal form of reference that privileges neither side of the relationship. This technique is especially effective for a poetry that wants to speak directly to the act of interpretation (as Hass's poems often do) but that wants to do it without deconstructing itself to the point of unintelligibility.
"Time and Materials" is not the most shocking, cutting-edge, earth-shattering poetry that you will ever read. That's been done before. This is a poetry about balance, but it's a balance that still makes room for the occasional period of imbalance. One might even say it is a poetry about the balance between balance and imbalance. This sort of thing may not always make for the most tantalizing read, but what this poetry lacks in excitement it makes up for in substance.
Rating: - Outstanding poems
Since this book was purchased as a gift, I didn't have the opportunity to finish it before I had to send it off to its intended recipient. I truly enjoyed those poems I read, particularly the non-political poems in the first two-thirds of the book. The poetry is more musical than that of Ted Kooser or Billy Collins, who succeeded Hass as poets laureate.
Rating: - Time and Materials
An excellent book of poems for this time, Hass' first after a long hiatus. Fine work, sharp insights, neglected truths, good writing.
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