Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass clears a path in this new collection, 'Summer Snow,' steeped in California landscapes.
“No metaphors yet / For my father-in-law,” he writes in “Poem Not an Elegy in a Season of Elegies.” “He still in my head belongs to being.”
“[I]t is very good to be walking,” Hass observes in “Abbott’s Lagoon: October,” “Because you can almost hear the earth sigh / As it sucks up the rain.” Both the image and the poem’s title are as specific as the language in a field guide. That’s because Hass’ work here is steeped, as it has been throughout his career, in such California landscapes as the Sierra mountains and the soft crumple of the East Bay hills.
The fog makes Hass think of Christmas, although again, it is not metaphor he is after but something sharper, a feeling and a form. “It was August,” he concludes, “the planet just turning toward the dark, / A long way and not a long way from the short, dark days / We gather to celebrate the light surviving through.”This notion of survival — and of death, its necessary analogue — sits at the center of “Summer Snow,” which offers no illusions about the bittersweet consolations of looking back.
Hass’ language almost exactly echoes the original , but his intent is not ventriloquism or any other literary trick. Rather, he is seeking a more concrete connection, in which language, for a moment anyway, can capture the specifics of a situation, and in so doing, effect a kind of transference.
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