All the new thinking is about loss,” Robert Hass opens his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” an anchor to his second collection, Praise, published in 1979. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Here, we have a pair of lines that resonate as much as when they were first composed. What Hass is telling us is that the most fundamental things do not change, for good or ill, that loss is—as it must be—the necessary corollary, or even the cause, of joy.
“Longing, we say,” he continues, “because desire is full / of endless distances.”
It is, to me, a quintessential Hass poem, with its careful attention to both language and emotion, to the yearning, the aching hunger for connection, that touches us all.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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For Hass, such a sensibility is personal, but it is also environmental: “transhuman,” to borrow Robinson Jeffers’s term. Hass is one of the great nature poets of this or any era. “The black-headed / Steller’s jay is squawking / in our plum,” he writes in “Songs to Survive the Summer.” “Thief! Thief! / A hard, indifferent bird, / he’d snatch your life.” Nothing sentimental here, nothing soft or indistinct, just a recognition of the world’s difficult complexity.
And yet, to acknowledge the world’s difficulty is not to disrespect it. Nor is it to experience existence without love. Just think about that title, Praise, which represents both psalm and plainsong. “Mad seed. Death waits it out. It waits us out,” Hass’s poem “Against Botticelli” insists. “In our shamefast and steady attention / to the ceremony, its preparation, the formal hovering / of pleasure which falls like the rain we pray not to get / and are glad for and drown in.”
There it is, the double vision. There it is, the give-and-take. The rain, which can engender life, can also destroy it.
Then, there’s the directness of the language, a reflection of engagement as well as no small sense of complicity. Take “Heroic Simile,” which begins with Hass reimagining a moment from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. “The woodsman and the old man his uncle,” he tells us, “are standing in midforest / on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. / They have stopped working / because they are tired and because / I have imagined no pack animal / or primitive wagon.”
How astonishing, how unanticipated, to see the poet insert himself into the scene. Not as a character, nor as an observer, but rather as a figure far more nebulous: a capricious deity. “They are waiting for me to do something,” Hass continues, even as the moment has moved past his ability to offer assistance. “There are limits to imagination,” he avers. It’s a move that makes me catch my breath, Hass concluding the poem by leaving the woodsman and his uncle to remain in limbo, as he acknowledges and disavows responsibility.•
