Robert Hass's first book in ten years, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, will go on sale this October. The galley back copy has this to say:
"Robert Hass's new poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world and the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. Every new book by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception."
Here's one of the shorter poems near the beginning of the collection:
"Winged and Acid Dark"
A sentence with "dappled shadow" in it.
Something not sayable
spurting from the morning silence,
secret as a thrush.
The other man, the officer, who brought onions
and wine and sacks of flour,
the major with the swollen knee,
wanted intelligent conversation afterward.
Having no choice, she provided that, too.
Potsdamerplatz, May 1945.
When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.
Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.
If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.
I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied
swarming of insects near a waterfall.
Pried her mouth open and spit in it.
We pass these things on,
probably, because we are what we can imagine.
Something not sayable in the morning silence.
The mind hungering after likenesses. "Tender sky," etc.,
curves the swallows trace in air.
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