Late in Summer Snow — Robert Hass’s seventh collection and first in almost a decade — the poet offers a poem entitled “Two Translations from Anglo-Saxon,” the first of which relates the details (with much of the Anglo-Saxon accentual music intact) of a battle fought in Britain in 937. Once the event of the battle ends, the poem tells of “Constantinus …[who] fled the fighting” after the death of his “kinsmen,” “friends,” and “own son / young.”
Then, unexpectedly, the poem turns in emphasis. After mentioning, as if in passing, that “the hoary old soldier had nothing to sing of,” the ancient poem doubles back:
… Not much for the greybeard
to sing praise of in that sword-work,
the old fraud …
In the hands of another translator, these lines might not seem particularly notable. But it’s worth considering whether Robert Hass — whose concern with a wry metapoetics hearkens back to the “Pornographer” poems of 1973’s Field Guide — might have been drawn to this image of a “greybeard” trying (and failing) “to sing praise” in much the same way as one is drawn to a cracked mirror — which both reflects and distorts one’s own face.
That this “greybeard” might stand in for the poet offers, too, more than just a possibility of self-portraiture; there’s also an assumption about poetry implicit in these three lines—written over a thousand years ago — namely, that the proper work of poetry is “to sing praise.” Thus the failure of “the old fraud”: for how can one possibly “sing praise” in the midst of such destruction, such “sword-work”?
This ancient question echoes across not only the centuries but also through many of Summer Snow’s 174 pages. How to offer praise when one looks around and sees nothing worth praising? Or, rather: How to praise when lamentation (or curse) seem more appropriate modes?
The answer lies — or begins to lie — in the epigram that serves as an epigraph in Hass’s second collection of poetry (itself entitled Praise):
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
‘I think I shall praise it.’
From the beginning, then, Hass’s definition of praise has been bound up with difficulty — with beasts “large, terrifying, and / unpredictable.” But what (or who), we might ask, are these beasts? And why must we praise them?
Early in Summer Snow, a long poem entitled “Second Person” begins with one of these beasts — the death of his friends — as its ostensible subject. The opening lines read:
That summer, after your friend had shot herself the previous November
in her backyard garden …
And after the sudden death from cancer of another friend, a prose writer …
These lines — which seesaw back and forth between poetry and prose — offer an almost-clinical, somewhat-blasé evaluation of death’s omnipresence in the speaker’s life. But the poem does not simply pile up deaths; rather, it flows along a paratactic course that finds the speaker, eventually, wandering through Parisian streets, working on a translation of a poem by Neruda (which will, just pages later, appear in its own right).
“And this is why you needed the second person singular,” Hass writes. He continues the thought a few lines later:
… You could have said, ‘That summer
After my friend had shot herself’ or ‘That summer after his friend
had shot herself,’ but it was you who walked the streets those mornings,
Wavering a bit among the grammatical propositions as you woke to the
early summer coolness in the air …
These moments are typically Hassian in their desire to graft the process of writing a poem into the poem itself. Ever since Hass’s speaker “imagined no pack animal / or primitive wagon” for the “woodsman and the old man his uncle” in his poem “Heroic Simile,” Hass has demanded of his poetry a certain rigor that refuses to rest in the artifice of poetry—and so, paradoxically, doubles down on it — at every turn.
Though this proclivity for second-guessing can become, at times, tiring — or, worse, merely performative — Hass’s most-successful poems know exactly when to yield authority and, importantly, when to wrest it back. As in the final lines of “Second Person”:
… By the middle of
July it was hot and you walked long hours in the city
And by eight o’clock—you had begun living in time—when you came
back to the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,
And you would sit at one of the outdoor tables and the proprietor would
set down in front of you, with a delicate glassy sound,
A chilled glass of Lillet, you would remind yourself that the proprietor
was not death,
Nor was the Lillet, nor the handsome couple at the next table ordering
grilled river fish.
Here we find Hass at his best: writing in praise of what surrounds him most immediately. No, death has not been forgotten — but, in these final lines, Hass refuses to give it the final word. It’s difficult to classify a poem that begins as this one does as a poem in praise of life — and yet, who else is “the proprietor” but life, what else could the “chilled glass of Lillet” be but life, if they aren’t (and they aren’t) death?
Moments like this one—in which Hass steps back from the scene and allows it to breathe on its own — are where Summer Snow reaches its highest points. The final lines of “Nature Notes in the Morning” find this easy balance of mimesis and worrying-about-mimesis:
Sierra morning.
Bright sun. No wind,
So that stirring in the cottonwood
Must be a warbler.
As with many of Hass’s best poems, these lines deceive in their simplicity. “No wind,” he assures us — and yet, the very act of such a particular negation actually renders the shadowy presence of what’s been negated, which we realize only after we’ve turned the corner of the enjambed second line and come upon “that stirring in the cottonwood.”
These instances of delightful discovery make a handful of the poems — perhaps inevitable in a book as long as Summer Snow — frustrating in their absence of immediacy. In a poem like “The Creech Notebook” — which recounts Hass’s multi-day road trip to Creech Air Force Base to protest the U.S. military’s use of drones — it can feel as if the subject (worthy as it is) has overwhelmed the actual poem.
There are notable lines, certainly — as when the speaker notes the “bleak splendor to the look of things” in the desert landscape — but, regrettably, these moments end up as mere ornamentation to a poem whose structure struggles to contain the jotted-down anecdotes, magazine quotations, and statistics it’s been asked to hold.
Paradoxically, these poems of (more-explicit) witness achieve more the less they stay fastened to “traditional” lineation: “After Xue Di” — written exclusively in prose — moves elliptically from a “car bombing in a village in Syria” to memories of the speaker’s child to, finally, an image of
A child’s skeleton preserved in the peats of the Ukrainian praire. The curved horns of
sheep arranged around the small body.
In this poem, the external sources — journalistic quotations, numerical data, historical anecdotes — are all present, but Hass has arranged them with a lyrical ingenuity that doesn’t rely on the subject matter alone for its poetic tension.
Whatever their faults or strengths, these poems of witness allow us to attach specific names to some of the “large, terrifying, and / unpredictable” beasts to which Praise’s epigram alludes. Car bombings, drone strikes, mass shootings, friends lost to cancer — the list goes on — all these find their way into Summer Snow. But why, we still ask, does the captain choose praise as his preferred avenue? And why did the Anglo-Saxon poet assume a posture of praise for the “old greybeard” and his poetry?
Though — perhaps by definition — the answers to these questions can only ever arrive as half-formed, oblique, and, slightly-out-of-focus, Hass laces his reasoning into the very fabric of his poems. Over and again, in the face of subjects ranging from “a shiny little beetle going about its shiny beetle business” to death’s “presence in the world, social class // By social class, war zone by war zone, brutal here, gentle there,” Hass continues to maintain that poetry — despite its flaws and failures — can order these disparate data into something like a manageable whole.
We see this philosophy at work in an oblique but moving poem entitled “Hotel Room,” which finds its speaker cataloguing the different aspects of the eponymous room. After noting “a monotype print / of three fossil ferns,” Hass’s thought wanders to “‘the oldest fossils of land plants // Visible to the naked eye’” before observing:
— ferns came later, carboniferous
And bilaterally symmetrical
as if to invent the possibility
of being orderly and lyrical at once,
as if, before mammals, to have
Invented wings.
It’s difficult not to hear a description of Hass’s poetry here: “the possibility / of being orderly and lyrical at once” — and yet, the poem tells us, there’s more than just those adjectives; there’s also the possibility of “wings,” of flight.
But a flight to where? The poem ends with a meditation on Picasso’s Don Quixote, a print of which is affixed to “another wall” of the room — and which, too, Hass’s speaker playfully observes as “just a few squiggles / of black paint on paper.”
But the poet knows it’s more than that. “One circular movement of the hand / for a sun,” writes Hass, as if describing the act of writing, “a quick dash for the horizon …” The poem ends:
The windmill in the distance
is desire, I suppose,
but it’s a long way off
and the riders are in no hurry.
Despite Hass’s almost-compulsive impulse to self-analysis, these final lines refuse to interpret themselves. Perhaps the speaker is too tired to explain; or, knowing Hass, perhaps he’s merely content, in this small moment of “being orderly and lyrical at once,” to let his characters—and himself—rest for a little while.
Like the answers to Summer Snow’s many, disparate questions, local and existential alike — desire remains, at the end of this poem, where it’s always been: receding into “the distance,” never quite in hand, but never — importantly — entirely out of reach.
[Published by Ecco on January 7, 2020, 174 pages, $27.99 hardcover]