[In the following excerpt, Kalstone comments favorably on the sequence "Songs to Survive the Summer" but observes that Praise as a whole is an uneven work.]

One of the tests for good poets these days seems to be whether they can take the leap from writing accomplished short poems to building longer structures, refigure their isolated lyric discoveries as part of a larger tissue of inquiry…. Robert Hass—though on a small scale—[does so successfully] in the sequence, "Songs to Survive the Summer" that closes his new book, Praise. Perhaps it's no accident that the poem … is addressed to a young daughter in whose presence her father is made to feel "This is my life, / time islanded / in poems of dwindled time." The songs are triggered by what he and his daughter hear from the child next door: "Let's play / in my yard. It's OK, / my mother's dead." The dead woman, 31, had been a friend of his daughter, had taught her to weave. The set of poems, obliquely related to one another, is an attempt to forestall her nightmares and fears. One section was in fact a separate poem, "For Chekhov," in Mr. Hass's first book, where it seemed orphaned; here it is truer because more tentative, only one among a number of views of suffering. The sequence is invigorated by its variety: youthful memories, a recipe, tales, even an unexpected revelation in the story of Wilhelm Steller, whose discovery of the jay later named after him led to the fortuitous, almost overlooked discovery of Alaska. The "Songs" emerge as a chap-book of bitter pleasures in which death is "all things lustered / by the steady thoughtlessness / of human use."

This is the best poem in a generally unsettled book. Mr. Hass's first collection, Field Guide, the Yale Younger Poets selection in 1972, was a set of fine, troubled lyrics by a wary naturalist. It took its title from the "terrifying field guide" that teaches us to identify poisonous mushrooms. Its encounters were alive to evolutionary detail ("Creature and creature, / we stared down centuries"), and its historical curiosity reawakened buried presences in California life. In Praise Mr. Hass suffers a crisis of confidence in his early style. Structuralism seems to have gotten to him too noticeably, though he silences with black-berries the "Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan." "A word is elegy to what it signifies," he tells us; but it is disconcerting to find whole poems cast as elegies for the lost immediacy of his earlier writing: "I used to name the flowers."

Mr. Hass is tempted to give up Roethke for Merwin, the minutiae of growth for the thresholds of eternity:

I am outside a door and inside
the words do not fumble
as I fumble saying this.

These are the first lines of a successful effort in his new style, "Like Three Fair Branches From One Root Deriv'd," a poem that symbolically stills, even fuses the warring elements in love. Other attempts at vision—"Transparent Garments," for example—do not work so well. In a mixed and more congenial style, "The Origin of Cities" and "Not Going to New York: A Letter" are particularly appealling. But Praise as a whole is uneasy.