Description: A finalist for the 1996 National Book Award, "Sun Under Wood" is full of wit and energy, sadness and humor, and a passion for language and experiences, words and ideas. Now in paperback, this collection explores family life, nature, history, and literature in Hass' singular intelligence and unmistakable voice.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes: "No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass."-- "The Atlantic Monthly""Sun Under Wood is Hass at his best. It is a book to reread, always with the lucky sense of walking through a meadow with a friend, deep in the best kind of exchange."-- "Los Angeles Times"The poems in Hass's fourth collection -artfully assembled from prose, epigram, conversation, and free verse--prove both meditative and emotional. Hass is able to aestheticize loss without succumbing to either nostalgia or self-consciousness.... His new poems are plangent and ecstatic." -- "The New Yorker"