A Third Commonness - by Robert Hass (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times--a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some "propelling force."

Review Quotes

Praise for Robert Hass

"Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He's an open book; but he's also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on."--The New Yorker

"The book isn't merely a master class on form. It's a jump-starter for that most necessary of tools for the artist or lover of art, if not for everyone: the sensibility."--Craig Teicher, New York Times

"Paying deep attention is clearly Hass' way of honoring the subjects that compel him. . . . This is a book of wide-awake, erudite prayer."--Gayle Brandeis, SFGate

"Vietnam, Iraq, Dostoyevsky's characters, dishes of raspberry and chocolate, a gardener who once worked for Emily Dickinson, and many more images are here developed in Hass's richly allusive mind."--James Naiden, Rain Taxi

"These poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture."--National Book Foundation

"Hass seems to suggest we may hope for more: poetry, being inherently political, may help us grasp and appreciate the reality of what we are doing and of what can and must be done."--Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle

"A remarkable volume of poems. . . . 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."--Southwest Review

About the Author

Robert Hass--poet, critic, and teacher--is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary's College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics until his retirement in 2019.