[Bogen is an author and educator. In the following review, he remarks favorably on Human Wishes.]

What's immediately striking in Robert Hass's work is the sheer abundance of pleasures. Who else among our poets would bring together the delights of landscape, climate and food in a salad "with chunks of cooked chicken in a creamy basil mayonnaise a shade lighter than the Coast Range in August" ("Vintage") or include a recipe for onion soup—complete with shredded Samsoe and advice on how to eat it with friends—as a "Song to Survive the Summer"? In his incisive collection of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures, Hass set our engagement with poetry squarely in the context of other forms of satisfaction—in domestic life, in nature, in the senses. The title of his new book of poetry, Human Wishes, reveals his basic concerns: He is a student of desire, of what we want and how likely we are to get it.

If one pleasure of poetry is the evocation of beautiful things, Hass's work definitely satisfies. From his first book, Field Guide, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973, through Praise in 1979 and now Human Wishes, he has shown a mastery of sensory description, combining the light touch of a calligrapher with the specificity of a botanist. Place—particularly northern California, where he grew up and now lives—has always been central in Hass's poetry, and few writers capture the special qualities of this environment as well. "January" gives a fine sense of that gorgeous oddity, a Bay Area winter:

     Back at my desk: no birds, no rain,
     but light-the white of Shasta daisies,
     and two red geraniums against the fence,
     and the dark brown of wet wood,
     glistening a little as it dries.

Hass's continuing engagement with Japanese poetry is evident here. Casual in tone, the lines seem almost transparent, as if they were just a moment's observation. Yet their arrangement is exquisite. The contrast between the blank monosyllables of the first line and a half—"no birds, no rain"—and the sudden appearance of those specific, polysyllabic Shasta daisies; the step-by-step expansion of the color scheme—"white," "red," then "dark brown"; the subtle echoes of sound in "red" and "wet," "daisies" and "dries"; and the hint of blank verse for closure in the last line show a rigorous and self-effacing craftsmanship. The lines have been written so well they hardly seem "written" at all.

With his California subjects and his skill at evocation, Hass could easily have settled for the reproduction of a predictable and popular verse "product." Indeed, a few years after Field Guide came out, a small fad for poems with references to food, accounts of hikes and other surface elements of his work flourished in the literary magazines. But Hass is after something more than sensuous word painting. The mind behind the description is analytical, probing, unsatisfied with the conventional stances language often provides. The poems in Human Wishes are energetic and full of surprises. They turn on themselves suddenly, breaking into self-consciousness or rejecting their initial visions, as when the idyllic reverie of "Late Spring" is revealed to be a fabrication that keeps the poet awake at night, or the list of pretty images at the start of "Spring Drawing" and again in "Spring Drawing 2" implies but then fails to generate a sentence.

Hass's awareness of the limits of language helps fuel his restless exploration of different poetic strategies. Each of his books makes use of a range of approaches and forms, from rhymed iambic pentameter to haiku, from brief lyrics to sequences of fragments to long discursive meditations. In Human Wishes he consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while pushing on into fresh territory. The first section of the book, for example, develops a new kind of line: lengthy, proselike in its rhythms and set off in a stanza by itself. These lines function as independent postulates in an argument, some plush and physical like the one about chicken salad, others gnarled with abstraction like these from the first poem in the book, "Spring Drawing":

     as if spirit attended to plainness only,
     the more complicated forms ex-
     hausting it, tossed-off grapestems
     becoming crystal chandeliers,
 
     as if radiance were the meaning of
     meaning, and justice responsible to
     daydream not only for the strict
     beauty of denial,
 
     but as a felt need to reinvent the inner
     form of wishing.

Hass has never shied away from the language of theoretical discourse. In fact, he finds a rarefied music in the polysyllabic abstractions, long clauses and parallel constructions of his argument. This is not a music everyone will enjoy. It can be daunting to encounter a passage like the one above on the first page of a book of poetry. But if the demands on a reader are high, they signal Hass's commitment to his enterprise: an art that can both evoke and analyze the complexity of human desires.

The second section of Human Wishes consists of prose poems, a form prefigured in some of the work in Praise but not developed consistently until now. Rimbaud is the father of this type of poem, and much American work in the genre still reads like a bad translation from the French. Hass has avoided the portentousness and easy surrealism that can afflict paragraphs trying too hard to be poetic. Instead, he looks to narrative models—the short story, the anecdote—as well as to allegory and the personal essay as guideposts. A few of the shorter prose poems—"Duck Blind," "In the Bahamas"—can seem a little thin, but the longer pieces give him room to juxtapose scenes and events, building up a constellation of meaning. "The Harbor at Seattle," for example, looks at friendship and personal tragedy within different contexts of history, art and work. Each paragraph in this beautifully structured poem works like a controlled reaction as the poet puts two elements together, notes the effects, then moves on to the next step. In the title poem of Human Wishes, Hass achieves a more dense interactive texture. This page-long paragraph uses rapid shifts of focus, from the Upanishads to a Cambridge pub, to expose a web of varied individual desires—for beauty, for understanding, for wealth, for a good time with friends—in all its intricacy and imperfection.

The unspoken element in all "human wishes" is, of course, vanity. Hass may not be as explicit as Juvenal on this point—he finds beauty in some of these wishes, flawed as they are—but he's well aware of the devastating power of time and human failings. In the extended meditations that make up the last two sections of Human Wishes, he traces pleasures and their loss—in love, in family life, in the living world—with intelligence and a deft control of tone. Despite the wealth of personal detail in these poems, there is little overt self-dramatization. The poet is not set up as the tragic hero of his own life. His presence in the work is rather that of a man thinking: remembering, describing, defining, comparing, imagining.

As in the prose poems, the strength of these meditations lies in Hass's ability to handle several themes at the same time and his exploration of the range of possibilities the form presents. In one of the most intriguing, "Berkeley Eclogue," he takes on the hoary literary convention of the pastoral dialogue. The decorous speech of stylized shepherds becomes an internal argument, with a harsh second voice—a kind of nagging muse—prodding the poet toward more clarity and depth with italicized comments such as "You can skip this part" and "Do you believe in that?" Other meditations are symphonic in structure. "Santa Barbara Road" introduces, repeats and varies several different motifs—the poet building a bench, children and their parents, classical Chinese thought, June weather, various walks—in an extended reflection on the abundance and impermanence of family life.

Hass's sense of the interrelatedness of all human endeavor gives his book a breadth of perspective and a distinct focus. Even the man brewing one cup of tea and immersing himself in his own memories at the end of "Thin Air" is connected to the frustrated warehouse worker who packed the tea leaves. This is not liberal sympathy but a recognition of how things work, of the context of suffering and loss in which we live. It is a mark of Hass's integrity as a poet that he rejects the usual consolations here. Art, nature, love—these are certainly pleasures but not solutions. They are parts of what he calls in "On Squaw Peak"

     … the abundance
     the world gives, the more-than-you-
     bargained-for
     surprise of it, waves breaking,
     the sudden fragrance of the mimulus at
     creekside
     sharpened by the summer dust.
     Things bloom up there. They are
     for their season alive in those bright
     vanishings
     of air we ran through.

If the first half of the passage is as rich and surprising as its subject, the last sentence stumbles on the perfect awkward placement of "for their season." In Human Wishes Robert Hass captures both the brightness of the world and its vanishing.