Long, laddering lines impel you down the page as Hass contemplates the living and the dead, the human and the wild with yearning and philosophic poise. This lustrous retrospective collection, drawn from five previous books, beginning with Field Guide (1973), opens with a generous selection of new poems redolent of Whitman and the blues. Narrative poems are droll and astringent in their musings over love's paradoxes and history's shifting claims, children's pleasures, poverty, and danger. A National Book Award winner and former poet laureate prized for his insights into human nature and our place in the web of life, Californian Hass distills experiences down to their essence as he limns landscapes, portrays friends and loved ones, and imagines the struggles of strangers. The ordinary is cracked open to reveal metaphysical riddles in poems that feel so natural, their formal complexities nearly elude our detection. Legacies and ruptures, sex and food, the journaling impulse to stop time, the "strangeness of living," all become catalysts for the tonic perceptions shared by this compassionate master poet who declares, "Joy seized me."
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