This past Thanksgiving, a friend gave me a copy Robert Hass's Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, and at first, I did not take to the book. However, it wooed me slowly over the past several months, and I now have sincere interest in and respect for Hass's work--respect that concurs with the book's garnering of both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
What I love most about the book is Hass's complete disregard for trendiness and fads. With Time and Materials, Hass makes it clear that making interesting, sincere, and diverse poems remains his primary preoccupation. His poems discuss relationships, memory, history, romance, art, and landscape with a unique, friendly, and at times humorous voice. These are poems of biology, of beauty, and of hope.
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Thanks to the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley, you can watch Hass read many of the poems that appear in Time and Materials in the following video. The reading is about 46 minutes and gives you a wonderful sense of Hass's voice and demeanor.
1 comments:
He was a wonderful teacher, too.
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