The Apple Trees at Olema

Robert Hass is an American poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. 'The Apple Trees at Olema' is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and includes work from five books - 'Field Guide', 'Praise', 'Human Wishes', 'Sun Under Wood' and 'Time and Materials' - as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas.

Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes - San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country - are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style - formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Miosz - combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch.