Robert Hass’ new book Time and Materials is his first in 10 years. There’s much to like in this book, and there is much quintessential Hass here. The landscape is the familiar California of his earlier work, and topics range from art and its consequence, human relationships, and the pleasures of the senses. But there’s also much that’s different about this book compared to his earlier work. Never has the war or the consequences of the mechanization of war been so much in the forefront. I’ll split my thoughts on his new book into what remains familiar, and what seems like new territory.
Can anyone compose a list with such touch? The effect is both simple, but carries a film-like quality. “Twin Dolphins” gives us this:
Harlequin sparrows in a coral tree.
One halcyon harrying another in the desert sky,
Blue, and would be turquoise,
Would be stone.Bone china handle of a coffee mug: the moon.
Poems that contain elements of a list in Hass’ work read almost as a recording of the world, as witnessed. The structure of these declarative statements suggest their objectivity–but there’s clearly delight under the artifice.
There’s also a narrative possibility, that Hass uses to great effect. We read the poem as a progression–in the descriptive list Hass is continually filling out a scene with ever more clarifying detail. Syntactically, it is one simple observation after another. There is a conversational quality. But often in moments where Hass has built a scene, he inserts–in the same form of simple observation–a grand abstraction. While we are expecting description, Hass describes something outside of the concrete world, some powerful abstract of it, some ruling tenet of its physical shape and experience. “Time and Materials,” the title poem, has good example in the third section:
To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.“Action painting,” i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.
Reviewing Time and Materials in the New York Times, Stephen Burt says “A sense of his large (by poetry standards) audience, and of responsibility to America and the American language, has perhaps helped him escape the self-satisfied chattiness that disfigured his poems of the 1980s; what he has lost in Californian ease he has gained in sterner self-restrain.” I don’t know if I agree with Burt’s thoughts on Hass’ conversational style–but I agree that there’s a larger sense of dealing topically with major issues of the contemporary American landscape. It’s as if Hass wants to weigh in on these things. More about that in the next post.
For now, my favorite poem in the collection is “I am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name is Dmitri.” The poem is a wash of detail, stream of consciousness style, free-flowing. It feels like Hass was challenging himself to see exactly how much he could fit into the poem. The effect is overwhelming–the reader just tries to hang onto the bit of narrative thread that pulls through while not getting sidetracked by Hass’ asides or ability to make a metaphor like this:
…I frankly admit the syntax
Of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands
Of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds
At the Somme, has escaped my grip.
And just when the poem’s whirlwind, scattered across history and space, seems that it can grow no bigger without consequence, Hass culminates the whole of it with with a remembered detail of how something looked and smelled, as if to say all the details of our lives are worth the price of admission.