[In the following review, Fahey criticizes Field Guide as self-consciously poetic, grounded in "ideas" and not in "words."]

The Yale Series of Younger Poets (e.g. anyone under forty and not yet published) has discovered some fine poets; most notably James Tate and recently Judith Johnson Sherwin for Uranium Poems, and Michael Casy for his acclaimed work, Obscenities. This year's winning volume has been described by Stanley Kunitz, the judge of the competition, as like "stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from the air." I find this compliment for Robert Hass's Field Guide accurate but in the pejorative sense.

One can easily fall into Robert Hass's poems and land not knowing what went by, and that, I feel is not an admirable quality. The work is deceptive. If one is skimming through the pages, the lines appear full of image; yet, after a closer look, the images are always a blur:

Casting, up a salt creek in the sea-rank air,
fragrance of the ferny anise, crackle of field grass
in the summer heat. Under this sun vision blurs
Blue air rises, the horizon weaves above the leaden bay
Rock crabs scuttle from my shadow in the silt.

These lines sound like a rather poor imitation of Dylan Thomas, while the jacket cover and foreword boast that the work is "earthy" and in the "American epic tradition." The author seems to be concentrating on ideas not words. Too often the stanzas appear to be consciously poetic. It doesn't work. Word arrangements behave as foreign bodies sitting next to each other, and quite uncomfortably at that. If one notices the relation of the title to the work it would seem to be a sophisticated directory of nature; that is to say that the descriptions are of "eucalyptus groves, aromatic fungi, pointillist look of laurels, slime of a saffron milkcap, fruity warmth of zinfandel, ornamental oranges, reedy onion grass" and on into "your acacia grove" folks! I reckon that to go through Mr. Hass' garden of thought I better fetch my Oxford English Dictionary.

Ironically the best lines in the entire volume are the most simple and representative of the fault in this work:

But I had the odd
feeling, walking to the house
to write this down, that I had left
the birds and flowers in the field,
rooted or feeding. They are not in my
head, are not now on this page.
It was very strange to me, but I think
their loss was your absence

I should have liked to be there.