Field Guide is both the poet [Robert Hass] and his remarkable volume of poems, a tour through the America of his historical and political consciousness, his vast privacy of landscape. In a "Letter" to his wife he states: "I have believed so long/in the magic of names and poems." This belief extends his geography past any coastal boundary, and his vision telescopes through love for his family to focus with "an ancient/imagination" on "what is familiar/felt along the flesh."

The purpose of the book, then, is to name these feelings, the undercurrent that flashes through "the pulse/that forms these lines." There are three sections. The first, "The Coast," is set in California, the last frontier. Hass is fascinated by his woman and the land, and his marriage to both evokes a timelessness, a sense of ancestral memory. (p. 307)

[He] creates a beauty by working the language of the land, by preserving through his own life the perfect details of natural landscape.

The poems in "A Pencil" deal with writers and are necessarily self-conscious. Hass feels a brotherhood with all poets through history, through "the peace/of the writing desk/and the habitual peace/of writing." (p. 308)

This group ends with a series of "pornographer poems" that try to settle a difference, at least in the poet's mind, between physical reality and creative imagination. The pornographer keeps a pencil "in a marmalade jar/which is colored the soft grey/of a crumbling Chinese wall/in a Sierra meadow." This confusion of images suspends a sense of time, and the poet and his landscape often become one. The pornographer finds that nature is much more interesting than anything he can create, and in this sense the poet, in the act of writing, confesses his failure to express his loves with honesty. His role remains that of the guide…. The best poem in the volume, "In Weather," deals with his loss of place,… his adaptation to a new geographical location and its history, its role in his poetry. His ability to use the past of his forebears, to "kindle from their death/an evening's warmth," mellows him…. His darkness is one of constant self-discovery, the desire to fulfill himself in his time…. (pp. 309-10)

The final poem, "Lament for the Poles of Buffalo," echoes Lowell in its attempt to take historical situations and place them directly in his own experience. He addresses the Polish people in their isolation from their homeland and attempts to give them a sense of the history of upstate New York, something as rugged and private as their own proud past…. As these people have lost their dream of America, Hass too has seen his dream of their heritage, culled from books, grow less romantic, less healthy and rustic. He sees them all united in this desolation, "married in dead salmon." Yet he compares their sons, in their concern for the land and the way it shapes and changes a man, to the Indians as well as their rugged Polish ancestors. This "ancient imagination" holds sway, draws them together in a sense of continuing grace, a spirit of loving survival. This past "translates easily" into their own lives.

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. This is a lot to accomplish, yet Robert Hass manages it with clarity and compassion. He is a fine poet, and his book is one of the very best to appear in a long time. (pp. 310-11)