In A Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography—from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves histories with the boundless hand of a passionate reader inseparable from literary vitality. Hass revels at genius as if saying, Here it is, this stretch of it. Sometimes with a requiem, at others with romance or political reckoning, Hass returns to the amazements of a poetry that encounters itself over and again, beckoned into being by some “propelling force.”
ISBN: 9781556597282
Format: Paperback
from A Third Commonness
And it makes one realize that the most influential American poems, Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” and Eliot’s “The Wasteland” are both poems rooted in vegetation myth, Whitman’s poem a celebration of an endlessly renewable, deeply democratic power in the natural world, Eliot’s poem a portrait of the failure of the nature in an urban world of spiritual drought and sexuality gone wrong. It is a world in which connection has failed and the renewing powers of the earth are a source of dread or melancholy regret. “April is the cruelest month,” the poem begins, mocking, it seems, the opening of The Canterbury Tales. Critics and readers have been arguing for several generations about whether Eliot’s poem, borrowing its theme of natural renewal from Jessie Weston’s study of the agricultural roots of the Grail myth, should be read as a search for natural renewal or a rejection of it. And it’s not clear if Eliot knew himself.
Praise for Robert Hass
“Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He’s an open book; but he’s also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on.”—The New Yorker
“[A Little Book on Form] isn’t merely a master class on form. It’s a jump-starter for that most necessary of tools for the artist or lover of art, if not for everyone: the sensibility.”—Craig Teicher, New York Times
“Paying deep attention is clearly Hass’s way of honoring the subjects that compel him. . . . This is a book of wide-awake, erudite prayer.”—Gayle Brandeis, SFGate
“Vietnam, Iraq, Dostoyevsky’s characters, dishes of raspberry and chocolate, a gardener who once worked for Emily Dickinson, and many more images are here developed in Hass’s richly allusive mind.”—James Naiden, Rain Taxi
“Hass seems to suggest we may hope for more: poetry, being inherently political, may help us grasp and appreciate the reality of what we are doing and of what can and must be done.”—Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle
“A remarkable volume of poems. . . . Field Guide is a means of naming things, of establishing an identity through one’s surroundings, of translating the natural world into one’s private history.”—Southwest Review