Sun Under Wood

I love this book, it's one of my favorite poetry books. It's a great read, I couldn't put it down! Even if you know nothing about poetry you will love this book.

A beautiful book. I have always liked his poetry and this collection did not disappoint.

Hass's tendency to enrich his verse in the natural world and in plain language while he still manages to delve his divorce and his mother's alcoholism. The swerves between confessionalism and naturalistic verse can be a little jarring. Furthermore, the references to place sometimes enrich the poems but sometimes feel like idiosyncratic memories for Hass. Still, Hass remains unpretentious and richly expressionistic.

The Magic Key: Robert Hass’s Sun Under Wood Robert Hass’s “Shame: An Aria” begins with a person observed by two “spruce” elderly couples in the act of “reaming out” his nose, a “wormy curl of one of the body’s / shameful and congealed lubricants gleaming” on his fingertip (43). What follows is an aria on “[t]he body’s fluids and solids . . . odorous pee-blossoms of the palest polleny color . . . russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax / phlegm” (44). Apparently Hass can choose any topic he wishes and turn it into poetry. His Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996) is a remarkable achievement; it provokes laughter, profound feeling, and serious thought. I can imagine Hass pausing for listeners to laugh at the jokes in some of the poems in Sun Under Wood. I’ve heard a large crowd laugh at the lines in “My Mother’s Nipples” that parody various viewpoints—the romantic’s, the capitalist’s, the saint’s, and the indigenist’s, among others—and I can imagine the same kind of reaction to the second section of “Dragonflies Mating.” In that poem a man in a bar recounts the story of asking his father why Coyote, the creator of the world, turned to pee in the place where the ocean would be to avoid drowning anybody when nobody existed yet. His father looked up with a “funny smile / and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that” (7). Hass’s humor stems partly from pacing; in “A Note on ‘Iowa City, Early April’” he imagines a raccoon watching him as he considers E. O. Wilson’s idea that “every species lives in its own sensory world” (36). Each time he suggests what the raccoon might be thinking, he undercuts it: “Maybe that, but I don’t know. The raccoon was silent” (37). The humor in Hass’s poems is linked with deep emotion and serious thought. He writes movingly about his mother’s alcoholism (feeling sorry for her because she had “no habit and so no means of self-knowing” [19]) and of the pain of his own divorce. He writes also of joy. The first poem in the book, “Happiness,” is joyous. It introduces the first of the many abstractions that crowd into the poems: mystery, imagination, sorrow, mercy, sadness, cruelty, life, self-love, art, truth. These abstractions are necessary, not tacked-on interpretations or morals; they are far from empty. “Regalia for a Black-Hat Dancer” returns so obsessively to the idea of emotional emptiness—“the heart’s huge vacancy” (47)—that it made me understand nothingness as a physical state, the sense of being “hollowed out by pain” (47). Hass keeps telling readers where he is: Iowa, New Jersey, Anchorage, Warsaw, Jatun Sacha (a biological study center in Ecuador). This placing is partly a response to dislocations and displacement caused by grief and loss, but he also makes himself known to readers in more positive situations. He is always thinking, and he tells us where: “at the typewriter” (45); “It is summer as I write, / Northern California”(24); “Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat, / first day in the mountains” (7); “Everywhere, of course, it was Korea” (58). Giving his location and explaining the links to his thinking prevents the lack of coherence that in my view marred the final poems in Human Wishes ( Ecco, 1989). Hass identifies real situations in which abstract thought seems essential to him. Hass loves language. He repeatedly acknowledges its importance, opening Sun Under Wood with a Middle English poem, quoting stanzas of poetry in Spanish, and referring to hangul (a Korean alphabet) and Athabascan, a language of one of the indigenous peoples of North America. He writes an ode to the English language and dramatizes the role of language as a medium of creation in another poem, “The Seventh Night.” In “Interrupted Meditation,” which closes the book, an impassioned Pole declares “We were not put on earth . . . to express ourselves” (73) yet reveals that in the terrible years of World War II when Jews may (or may not) have been surviving on food he surreptitiously dropped for them, “What we had was language” (74). The Pole tells Hass, “you don’t excel at metaphor” (75), but he softens this criticism by offering him a metaphoric “magic key” that makes the poet think again of his failed marriage. Language does not feed the dying, yet for Hass and his readers it opens experience in a mysterious and painful way. Sun Under Wood critiques the poet’s and scholar’s obsession with naming. Hass names the “reedgrass, the bentgrass and timothy, little quaking grass, / dogtail, rip-gut brome” (18-19) and gives birds their true names: Audubon warbler, magnolia warbler, bufflehead, western grebe, titmouse, nuthatch, crow, cardinal. Yet he understands the limits of naming. “Sonnet” compares the “tendered civility” (38) of an ex-wife’s voice on the phone to broken seed pods of ornamental trees that “no one / but horticulturists can name” (38). In Korea he wants to bring flowers to a statue of Buddha, but language fails again: I thought I might pick them, bring them in, and drop them before the—what—the Buddha— the carved, massive stone, the— (52) In “English: An Ode” Hass recalls a young poet “impatient / with her ornithologist boyfriend, his naming / everything to death” while she thinks “bird, bird!”(67). Hass is like both young people, responding ecstatically to the natural world as the young woman does, yet, like her boyfriend, naming what he sees. Language is inadequate when he considers his own pain: “There ought to be some single word for the misery of divorce” (50) he complains, then breaks the same line into an Emily Dickinson-like pattern he cannot complete: “duh-dduh-duh-duh-dduh-fierce/remorse/ pierce/” (50). This follows an account of his addict brother’s stuttering description of coming down from crack; the poet’s pain is like his brother’s, and language fails both of them. Hass not only violates readers’ expectations by writing about picking one’s nose and noticing a “faint russet in the crotch” of a lover’s abandoned yellow panties (40) but also by choosing social and political issues as his subjects. He acknowledges that “There are those who think it’s in fairly bad taste” to refer to “social and political problems” (65), yet he treats them directly in the book: alcoholism and divorce, deadly diseases brought to California by its first European settlers, bleak diplomatic maneuvers before the Gulf War, pogroms during World War II, starvation in Korea, the imprisonment and torture of writers, and the dislocation of women and children in the aftermath of colonialism. Despite this tapestry of suffering and injustice, Hass continues to search for meaning, to celebrate love and sexual longing, and to love the world with its “flameheaded woodpecker” (34) and the “singing” that “simmers / from every color the morning has risen into” (11). In the last lines of the book he admits that he’s “a little ashamed” of it but declares “I want to end this poem / singing” (76). He knows what matters: he goes beyond the political and personal to affirm the desire for song.

What to say of someone for/of whom so much has been said? In Sun Under Wood Haas' subjects are neither pregnancy nor egg, but the film of both: shell & amniotic fluid, full of a delicate exigency. Animals haunt these pages with a sad accuracy, their eyes pointers on a blackboard-"Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was / writing at the kitchen table, / Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled / defiant terror, like a thing with no choices." Dragonflies "can't wound each other the way we do. / They don't go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger, / kill with it, smear it on everything." I sense in this book not so much an excavation of experience, or a symbol-seeking in nature (as he himself is conscious of in the opening poem, "Happiness," where a small flock of tundra swans "symbolize mystery, I suppose"), but a serious meditation on the forces (including people themselves) that give & take away-both "what seems / the entire vocabulary of resignation" and "a various blossoming." As I read, I kept thinking that I had come upon the pivotal poem-My Mother's Nipples, Faint Music, Shame: An Aria-but (as this list is a dollop) I kept coming upon another fulcrum, each its own orchestra & cell. Haas bring to mind [& body] pain, loss, desire in a way that feels truthfully complex-"small droplets in the sheets of the body's shuddering late-night / loneliness," and elsewhere, "underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering." There is a lovely oddity in the language, where "the raccoon-universe" takes place. The details (and description of) glisten: an elevator as a "commodious aluminum group coffin," "a room full of bright plastics," "the heavy sweet smell of mock orange," and yet nothing is so evident to me in this book as worldwide, personnarrow cruelty and loss. Read this book, where even "Notes" are poem enough. "It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us."

The review from 'a reader' is a common tragedy. Hass, like any maturing master has found his happiness in acceptance. There is no resignation or distance in the work, it is deeply intimate and passionate. However, it is decidedly lacking in the immature rebellion against human reality. That rebellion relies on dualistic constructions: good experience vs. bad experience, good vs. evil, etc. Nature, of which humanity IS, can provide all the examples for finding our place in our world, no matter the pleasure or displeasure of our daily experiences. "nature stuff"--the very expression is absurd, its flavor indicative of the disconnection humankind lives with by choice. This book is simply wonderful, cover to cover. Hass creates a long ignored need for peaceful contemplation of the common ignorance of the richness of life we move too quickly past, discard and unconsciously dismiss as unimportant. Amazing imagery, flowing rhythm, new and precise 'witnessing' of nature and nature's meaning along with human sorrow. It gets uncomfortable, the way great poetry should, and yet Hass resolves the 'disenchantment' is very beautiful ways. Highly recommended.

Hass doesn't cross "The Confessional Risk Line" as Tuor puts it because he's a great writer. Lesser writers tell us how they feel. Great writers show us how we feel. More personal opinion: As I read Sun Under Wood, I had to set it down every few minutes to jot down notes for other projects because it's one of those books that set the gears in your head all spinning away toward different ends. A good thing when you need to write. Lyrical, fluid, spot-on. A small prize. "A Reader" says this is "More nature stuff," and I always get bristly when I hear that. "More nature stuff" sounds a bit reductive and condescending, don't you think? "A Reader" goes on to say that Hass "seems more resigned than before as to what life brings and is not fighting for happiness." Well. I don't think that writing a book of poems qualifies as resignation. "I had the idea that the world's so full of pain / it must sometimes make a kind of singing. / And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps-- / First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing."

In this book, Robert Hass treads close along the confessional risk line but never quite seems to slip over it. This avoidance is tricky, given the highly personal material in most poems here. (I'd define the CRL as the point at which a poet fails to generate sympathy in the reader when discussing what is posed as personal pain - truly autobiographical or not.) He manages not to trip up by the masterful use of several strategies: 1. Distraction: when approaching the kernel of pain in a poem, he mouths around it, noting with palpable wonder the beauty and strangeness of the natural world before returning to the kernel for another little gnaw. Eventually acceptance - not so much resolution, which is hard to find in this book - is the reward of rationed philosophical nibbling. In poem after poem, Nature is a necessary source of healing distraction, and occasionally so are the imagined lives of other people. What's implicit is a deep sense of trust in the process of healing, which requires time and attention, but not necessarily to the pain. 2. Fluidity: structural as well as tonal. Distracting himself and the reader when things start to sting could very well make for clunky, ungenerous verse, but his casual tone (which rarely if ever asks for pity, instead lingering over what excites his curiosity) somehow brings us along willingly. Even when the interruptions are overt ("Interrupted Meditation", "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer"), he doesn't derail. Perhaps this is because the reader has been coaxed into accepting Hass's constant shuttle between private musing and scrupulous description by 3. Beautiful, accurate language: Hass has a fine eye, and a fine ear to match. "dragonback of pine", "toss off grails of pure white idly" - the book sings often enough to singlehandedly justify the reader's attention. It's nice that Hass mostly refrains from simply treating his natural materials as springboards for hokey or artificial metaphors - as the old man says in "Interrupted Meditation", Hass doesn't excel at metaphor - but he does excel at bringing non-human life to vivid presence on the page. This book is largely about overcoming pain - not in the sense of triumph, but in the sense of swallowing, ingesting, receiving, and transforming. The ideas aren't all that big - just big enough to be useful and pleasurable. As Hass navigates his sorrow, we're glad he invited us along.