Human Wishes

About the Author:

Robert Hass is the author of two earlier collections of poems, Field Guide and Praise, and a book of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures. He has also collaborated with Czeslaw Milosz on the translation of his poems, most recently Collected Poems. His many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellowship and the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He has taught for many years at St. Mary's College of California and is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Publishers Weekly

In his third collection of poetry, Hass ( Praise ), National Book Critics Circle Award winner for criticism, writes elegiacally of the ``dizzying sensation'' of physical experience, and of natural beauty, ``casual and intense,'' to which words correspond but from which they are innately divided. ``A man thinks lilacs against white houses . . . and can't find his way to a sentence,'' Hass reflects, observing the suffusing ``radiance'' of bodily perception and impelled to evoke it as faithfully as possible, though language inevitably alters what it describes. The transience of the physical, perceived in the ``mortal singularity of the body,'' heightens the quiet drama of the poet's mission, represented powerfully in poems conveying that ``life has its limits''--most poignantly in love, where men and women ``are trying to become one creature, / and something will not have it.'' Feeling that they ``are an almost animal, / washed up on the shore of a world,'' and seeking their completion, humans, in Hass's subtle, searching meditations, must follow the course of their own implacable rhythms, whatever utopia they wish for. (Aug.)

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. He attended St. Mary's College and Stanford University. His books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen volumes of Milosz's poetry, including the book-length Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, and Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000. From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley.