Robert Hass' mostly enchanting collection of poetic disenchantment

"Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005"

by Robert Hass

Ecco, 88 pp., $22.95

Robert Hass is very much a California poet, a writer whose images tend to be comfortable, sunny, endowed with beautiful food, bird song and crisp foliage. Which isn't to say the poems are superficial or limited to place, but that they feel grounded, at ease.

The title of Hass' new book "Time and Materials" sums up the steady, workmanlike approach of this former United States poet laureate, who nevertheless points out that, "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us."

"Time and Materials" is Hass' first book of new poems in 10 years, but he is perhaps equally known for his role in bringing the poems of Czeslaw Milosz to English-speaking audiences. For many years Hass partnered with his friend Milosz on translating the Polish writer's verse. "Time and Materials" acknowledges the long collaboration, including Hass' poem "For Czeslaw Milosz in Krakow," and "Czeslaw Milosz: In Memoriam," a set of late poems by Milosz that the two poets translated together by e-mail and telephone. Also included here are the studies in translation, "Horace: Three Imitations" and "Tomas Tranströmer: Song."

Hass' own poems range from the succinct two-line opener "Iowa, January," to the long, occasional "State of the Planet," honoring the 50th anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: a perfect opportunity for the kind of far-ranging and precise observation Hass thrives on.

Hass seems to start his poems with what is at hand. In "State of the Planet," that's "Rain lashing the windshield" and a schoolgirl who "Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying." From that pinpoint image, he pans out: "One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind. Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations, / A book with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet."

With a few quick strokes, Hass masterfully sets the scene for a discussion of the Earth and its people that mocks the politicking and rhetorical hype alluded to in the poem's title and brings us back to reality — in a sense, disenchants us. At the same time, the poem delivers the rush of an opened state of mind — what art is all about. "It must be a gift of evolution," Hass writes, "that humans/Can't sustain wonder. We'd never have gotten up/From our knees if we could."

Not all Hass' poems pass the disenchantment test for this reader. In a few, some personal bewitchment seems to cloud his poetic judgment, as in the "can't get enough" poem "Then Time," in which a man and woman get philosophical in the midst of a marathon in the sack. Or the ho-hum love dialogue "Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly)". One of the few places Hass' tone goes awry is when sex is involved and he gets a bit smug and self-absorbed.

Mostly though, "Time and Materials" has perfect pitch, as in the following poem:

"The Problem of Describing Trees"

The aspen glitters in the wind

And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,

Because that motion in the heart of August

Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf

Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem

And the tree danced. No.

The tree capitalized.

No. There are limits to saying,

In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,

The aspen doing something in the wind.