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Overview
All through the book readers are invited to the quiet and intensity of reading, not exactly as if it were the blessed water in a medieval baptismal font in an old church, the entire violence of the world carved onto the outside of the font-that is the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's figure for the wish of poetry-but something more like a haiku of the eighteenth-century master Buson. It is a poem about a particular kind of Book of Hours, a cheaply printed, cheaply bound farmer's almanac. The poem goes like this: This old almanac, Gladdens my heart, Like a sutra.It would be pleasant if a book of this kind shared the qualities of almanac and sutra, in the way that poetry can seem both to penetrate time and penetrate our days, more deeply than our walking-around consciousness usually does, and to lift us out of it, the turning wheel, so that we can see ourselves and the life around us more clearly.
Synopsis
During his years as Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived a popular 19th-century tradition: including poetry in our daily newspapers. “Poet’s Choice” went on to appear as a nationally syndicated column across the country from 1997 to 2000. The column, which featured poems relevant to current headlines, serves as a symbol of the continuing importance of poetry in our daily lives. This collection contains well-known poets such as Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, John Ashbery, and Robert Frost, as well as emerging and translated poets such as Jaime Sabines and Czeslaw Milosz. Also included are Hass’s essays that accompanied the poems. Encapsulating a world before 9/11, this collection serves as both remembrance and reminder of a period in our history, and as a celebration of the poets whose works transcend time.
Publishers Weekly
In 1997, former poet laureate Hass inaugurated the now famous Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post Book World, in which he chose a poem and accompanied it with explanation or context. The goal was to make poetry more accessible to the general reader. Now all of Hass's columns are collected chronologically in a single volume. In the early columns, Hass keeps his statements short, offering mostly background for the week's poem, from standbys like Whitman and Frost, as well as favorites like Plath (about whose troubled biography he says, "I felt like I was summarizing a soap opera"), as well as poets who were unknown then and are perhaps still too little known now, like D.A. Powell (whose work "reads like a handheld camera") and Susan Wheeler. Later, longer columns range across time and space, rounding up everything from experimental writer Fanny Howe to the Serbian epic The Battle of Kossovo. Experienced poetry readers won't find surprises in Hass's good-humored, if sometimes slightly coddling, comments, but this book doubles as an unlikely anthology of poems that are easy to enjoy, and it makes a handy guide for those new to poetry and eager to experience its breadth. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationEditorials
Publishers Weekly
In 1997, former poet laureate Hass inaugurated the now famous Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post Book World, in which he chose a poem and accompanied it with explanation or context. The goal was to make poetry more accessible to the general reader. Now all of Hass's columns are collected chronologically in a single volume. In the early columns, Hass keeps his statements short, offering mostly background for the week's poem, from standbys like Whitman and Frost, as well as favorites like Plath (about whose troubled biography he says, "I felt like I was summarizing a soap opera"), as well as poets who were unknown then and are perhaps still too little known now, like D.A. Powell (whose work "reads like a handheld camera") and Susan Wheeler. Later, longer columns range across time and space, rounding up everything from experimental writer Fanny Howe to the Serbian epic The Battle of Kossovo. Experienced poetry readers won't find surprises in Hass's good-humored, if sometimes slightly coddling, comments, but this book doubles as an unlikely anthology of poems that are easy to enjoy, and it makes a handy guide for those new to poetry and eager to experience its breadth. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Former poet laureate Hass fuses down-home observations with complex critical commentary in his new work, a collection of his "Poet's Choice" columns from the Washington Post Book World. These brief, insightful reflections on everything from obscurities in Horace to familiar lines from William Butler Yeats span about two years and generally, but not always, concern newly published works of poetry and poetry translations. Some have a news hook, as in the discussion of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and its connection to the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair. Other essays are tributes to newly deceased poets such as Janet Lewis and Denise Levertov, while still others discuss qualities seen in Asian or Eastern European poetry. What unites this disparate collection is Hass's ability to home in on the telling detail. In the case of Levertov, for example, Hass uses words she had scrawled on a blackboard-"Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery"-as an entrance to her unique poetic vision. Ultimately, Hass understands the intricacies involved in the fine art of poetry and describes them clearly yet compellingly. Highly recommended.
—Diane Scharper