While not quite as rare as a lunar eclipse, a new book of poems by Robert Hass isn't likely to escape notice. In his first two collections, Field Guide (1973) and Praise (1979), Hass helped ignite a running dialogue between the possibilities of the lyric and the demands of the intellect. And the intellect, in his case, seemed to have won out. Over the past decade Hass's prominence has owed less to his distinctively crafted poems than to his determined undertakings as a critic (Twentieth Century Pleasures, a volume of gracefully erudite essays, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984) and translator (most notably, by way of his working partnership with Berkeley neighbor Czeslaw Milosz).

At an age by which many of his contemporaries are starting to cobble together their selected poems, Hass's restrained literary enterprise has had about it an air of almost monkish detachment. Naturally, then, one is tempted to regard the conspicuous hiatus between collections as the product of either painstaking ambitions or painful reservations. Human Wishes, as it turns out, provides ample evidence on both sides.

"I think I must have thought / the usual things," Hass muses early in "On Squaw Peak," a supple elegy for a miscarried child that closes the book. It's a moment that could serve as a refrain. Human Wishes teems with Hass's "usual things": studious observations of his native California landscape, reflections on the failed paradigms of language and desire, dilemmas over art's relation to social circumstance, appeals to a muscular sense of history and memory. But what gives the line its signature ring and the book its familiar cast is Hass's characteristic attempt to eavesdrop on his own intelligence, his impulse toward incessant revision and quiet skepticism. Nor has this most self-conscious of poets broken the mold of his colloquial yet elliptical meditative manner: more than ever, Hass seems to want to be overheard more than he wishes to address us, so absorbed is he in the workings of his mind, the sifting of his experience, and the act of articulation itself.

What's always righted Hass's tilt toward solipsism is his infectious zest—verging at times on fetish—for the world's sensual particulars. Happily, Human Wishes draws nourishment from a bulging horn of plenty—"sweet hermaphrodite peaches and the glister of plums," "the frank nipples of brioche," "chunks of cooked chicken in a creamy basil mayonnaise a shade lighter than the Coast Range in August." Riffs like these tell us unmistakably that we've happened onto a Hass poem. Where else can the mandarin break bread with the mystic, the Epicurean sit down with the Stoic? Yet Human Wishes confirms that there's more to Hass than courtly efforts to keep body and mind on speaking terms. The give and take of passionate dialectics lends this book its very grain, abstraction answering to detail, pleasure to pain, clarity to mystery, epiphany to commonplace. Then there's Hass's noted penchant for fleshing out contraries by way of the flesh itself, his candid tracking shot into bedrooms where lovers entwine in a blur of ardor and desperation. This time around, in two of the volume's finer poems, Hass opens the door on a couple who are "trying to become one creature / and something will not have it" ("Misery and Splendor") and who "close their eyes again and hold each other, each / feeling the mortal singularity of the body / they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so" ("Privilege of Being").

Obsessive though Hass is, mulish he's not. Despite unquestionable similarities in theme and manner, Human Wishes is at once a more ingratiating and disquieting book than its predecessors. Paradoxically, it appears as if Hass's poems now rest easier in their skins even as they feel sharper chills in their bones. He's more assured than ever, for example, in quarrying poems out of the personal and the local, in naming names and limning intimacies, all but pulling up a chair for us at the family table in his conviction that poetry begins at home. Hass's wife, children, and friends not only are routinely invoked but generously quoted, even, as in "Santa Barbara Road," when words are barely within reach: "Household verses: 'Who are you?' / the rubber duck in my hand asked Kristen / once, while she was bathing, three years old. / 'Kristen,' she said, laughing, her delicious / name, delicious self." It's difficult to think of any poet since Williams who so persuasively brings the pulse of daily common life to the page.

A good portion of that daily life, however, teeters on doubt and resignation. In Hass's previous books melancholy lapped at the poems' edges; here it wells up at almost every step. One trace of this residual sorrow can be detected in the nearly complete absence of Hass's once customary delight in marrying refined poetic measure to unpruned organic forms, the best efforts of which (Praise's "Weed" comes to mind) suggested a sturdy hybrid of hothouse prosody and wayside vernacular. In Human Wishes, he's given himself over almost entirely to the long line and block stanza, steadfastly adhering to unadorned, prose-like rhythms throughout the sinuous paragraphs and strict prose poems of the first half of the book and the sequences and monologues of the second. Nothing if not resourceful, he's cultivated a more open, intimately epistolary verse that makes room for everything from strenuous metaphysics, beguiling storytelling, and wry recollections to haiku-like snapshots, flinty epigrams, and tremulous lyricism. Yet, on another level, the self-effacing withdrawal from poetic shapeliness, the occasionally stolid essayistic manner, betrays a sensibility increasingly consumed with diminishment and flux. "There is no need for this dream-compelled narration," writes Hass abruptly at the close of "Late Spring," biting off the poem's lulling seasonal evocation: "the rhythm will keep me awake, changing."

Change Hass has, though time and age alone cannot account for the somber hues of Human Wishes. Even the youthful Hass was wise to how myths and hopes exhaust themselves, how language turns in on itself, how mindfulness is a mixed blessing. Here his concessions run deeper: provisionality and mutability make hash of human will and insight, not to mention human wishes. And where does that leave the poet? In part, prematurely autumnal (there's no small irony in the fact that so many poems here are spring and summer set pieces); in part, tempering his reckonings with a poetry unashamed of bordering here and there on prayer. Frost, you'll recollect, aspired to verse that might provide "momentary stays against confusion." Hass's new poems, whether zeroing in on the "interval created by if, to which mind and breath attend," or reaching to embrace "the blessedness of gathering and the blessing of dispersal," strive for equilibrium amid disorder—and reward us more often than not with something we might call equipoise.