SOURCE: A review of Field Guide, in Southwest Review, Summer, 1975, pp. 307-11.

[In the following review, Waters praises Hass's defi "translation" of both nature and personal history in Field Guide.]

Field Guide is both the poet 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. In the opening poem, "On the Coast near Sausalito," the poet catches "an ugly, atavistic fish" and holds it before him:

Creature and creature,
we stared down centuries.

While Hass and his wife struggle through their early years together, he places himself in a historical context with the men of his land, as varied as Kit Carson and Ishi, the last wild Indian. He dwells on the beauty of the Spanish and Indian names surrounding him, yet feels the violence associated with them: "Death shook us more than once / those days and floating back / it felt like life." He is always drifting through the landscape like a ghost, trying to transform (or, through his concern with language, translate) that past into something relevant and useful in his own life. In a "Graveyard at Bolinas" he sees lettuce growing on an early settler's grave and picks "a bunch / thinking to make / a salad of Eliza Binns."

Still, that violence, "the old fury of land grants, maps, / and deeds of trust," is ever present as a "tanker lugs silver / bomb-shaped napalm tins toward / port at Redwood City." This evidence of man's abusing the land is now reciprocated:

Nature shuns us, and the loss activates a bitterness charged with a personal identification with this diseased land: "My God, it is a test, / this riding out the dying of the West." Hass, as a poet, feels this self-denial deeply:

Some days it's not so hard to say
the quick pulse of blood
through living flesh
is all there is.

Yet it is this same pulse that 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." One poem, "After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa," is an extended form of linked haiku. In the earlier section, Hass noted the sensual exoticism of food:

Here he relaxes and laughs:

Other poems in this section deal with Basho, Baudelaire, Chekhov, and Jeffers. 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 poems in the last section, "In Weather," are set in the east, in Buffalo, N.Y. Hass thinks of himself here as a contemporary settler, starting a new life away from his home- and heartland, the California coast. He feels himself, for the first time, taking root in his experience: "I am conscious of being / myself the inhabitant / of certain premises." He is becoming history now, and his concern still remains in reshaping that sense into something useful, in gathering the past and its violence into something approaching beauty:

Counterpane:
Grandfather's Death

On the pillow
the embroidered flowers
are fading
fading that patient spider
my grandmother

who made the best
of losses
bright quilts from rags
that are every bird
Audubon ever killed
in America.

He sews a new landscape from the ragged remains of the past.

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. He misses the West, and the wasteland of the industrial city sets him writing, turns him inward: "The refuse of my life / surrounds me and the sense of waste / in the dreary gathering of it / compels me…." Still, even in such desolation, in the scraps of his own refuse, he finds some worth:

I was rewarded. A thaw turned up
the lobster shells from Christmas eve.
They rotted in the yard
and standing in the muddy field I caught,
as if across great distances,
a faint rank fragrance of the sea.

In his isolation he identifies more with animals, with a male sea-worm who lives inside the female, as he lives inside the solitude of his family. In bed at night, hearing an owl, he imitates its twoo sound and experiences the small pleasure of simple life:

I drew long breaths.
My wife stirred in our bed.
Joy seized me.

His darkness is one of constant self-discovery, the desire to fulfill himself in his time:

I know that I know myself
no more than a seed
curled in the dark of a winged pod
knows flourishing.

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. He makes them see their sons, more Americanized and politically conscious, as extensions of that heritage. He compares their languages, the "buckshot / on the tongues of your grandfathers" to the "pellets doctors dug / out of students' skulls last spring." 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.