Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world--with accompanying photos throughout.
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics--on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces--in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as "luminous."
In this essential collection for readers and writers, Hass demonstrates the essay as an act of attention, turning his remarkable eye to:
- Poetry Analysis: Close readings of poets from Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy, exploring how poetry is made and what it does.
- The Art of Photography: In-depth essays on landscape photographers like Robert Adams, considering how we see and imagine the earth through the camera's lens.
- Literature and Place: An exploration of California's literary landscape through the work of regional masters like Jack London, Mary Austin, and Robinson Jeffers.
- The Essay as a Form: A powerful demonstration of the essay as a search for meaning, moving from literature and war to the quiet epiphanies of the natural world.
About the Author :
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Review :
"Here [is] the prose of an intelligent man who wishes to served poetry--not appropriate it or crow over it or show off as its expense--and this is a rare enough experience to arouse gratitude and admiration." - Times Literary Supplement (London)
"[Hass'] final intention is not merely to judge but to give a picture of the writer's mind. . . . Mr. Hass believes that poetry is what defines the self, and it is his ability to describe that process that is the heart of this book's pleasure." - New York Times Book Review
"Not just professional acument but a truly personal commitment to his subjectes enlivens these enthusiastic, stylish, consistently interesting even compelling examinations. . . . As a demonstration of the critic's craft, this collection is, both in substance and style, an exemplary volume." - Booklist
"Hass brings formidable gifts and experience to the art of criticism...Characteristic of all of these pieces, of course, is Hass' great erudition (even bibliophiles may feel as if they've not read very much) but also a surpassing generosity of spirit, a determination to understand other writers and artists rather than to judge them. [P]rime in its class-literate, learned and wise criticism, with scarcely a breath of cynicism or disdain." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Drawn to compelling subjects that he makes his own, Hass writes prose every bit as zestful, penetrating, and sure-footed as his poetry. . . This powerful collection affirms Hass' stature as a philosophically attentive observer, deep thinker, and writer who dazzles and rousts." - Booklist
"[An] erudite and engaging collection... each overstuffed piece is an opportunity for meandering digression and fruitful association... The best essays transcend their subject matter, becoming works of literature in their own right... [Hass's essays] fuse the poet's love of language with the scholar's interest in context, demonstrating the truth of Hass's own claim that "the deepest response to a work of art is, in fact, another work of art." - Publishers Weekly
