What Light Can Do PB - by Robert Hass (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in hardcover: New York: Ecco, Ã 2012.

Book Synopsis

Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world--with accompanying photos throughout.

What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics--on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces--in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as "luminous."

From the Back Cover

An evocative and captivating collection of essays on writers, place, poetry, and photography--with accompanying photos throughout--from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Robert Hass

Renowned for his magisterial verse, Robert Hass is also a brilliant essayist. The New York Times hailed him as a writer who "is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure." Now, with What Light Can Do, Hass's first collection of essays in more than twenty-five years, the lauded author returns to and enlarges the territory of his critically acclaimed and much-loved collection Twentieth Century Pleasures, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

These acute and deeply engaging essays are as much a portrait of the elegant thought processes of an unconventional and virtuoso mind as they are inquiries into their subjects, which range from meditations on how we see and how we have treated the earth, to the relationship between literature and religion, from explorations of the works of writers as diverse as Korean poet Ko Un, Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and Anton Chekhov to the ways in which photography embodies--much like an essay--a sustained act of attention.

A perceptive and evocative mixture of memory, philosophical interrogation, and criticism, the essays in What Light Can Do, finely attuned to the pleasures and pains of being human, are always grounded in the beauty of the material world and its details, and in the larger political and social realities we inhabit.

Review Quotes

"Here [is] the prose of an intelligent man who wishes to served poetry--not appropriate it or crow over it or show off as its expense--and this is a rare enough experience to arouse gratitude and admiration." - Times Literary Supplement (London)
"[Hass'] final intention is not merely to judge but to give a picture of the writer's mind. . . . Mr. Hass believes that poetry is what defines the self, and it is his ability to describe that process that is the heart of this book's pleasure." - New York Times Book Review
"Not just professional acument but a truly personal commitment to his subjectes enlivens these enthusiastic, stylish, consistently interesting even compelling examinations. . . . As a demonstration of the critic's craft, this collection is, both in substance and style, an exemplary volume." - Booklist
"Hass brings formidable gifts and experience to the art of criticism...Characteristic of all of these pieces, of course, is Hass' great erudition (even bibliophiles may feel as if they've not read very much) but also a surpassing generosity of spirit, a determination to understand other writers and artists rather than to judge them. [P]rime in its class-literate, learned and wise criticism, with scarcely a breath of cynicism or disdain." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Drawn to compelling subjects that he makes his own, Hass writes prose every bit as zestful, penetrating, and sure-footed as his poetry. . . This powerful collection affirms Hass' stature as a philosophically attentive observer, deep thinker, and writer who dazzles and rousts." - Booklist
"[An] erudite and engaging collection... each overstuffed piece is an opportunity for meandering digression and fruitful association... The best essays transcend their subject matter, becoming works of literature in their own right... [Hass's essays] fuse the poet's love of language with the scholar's interest in context, demonstrating the truth of Hass's own claim that "the deepest response to a work of art is, in fact, another work of art." - Publishers Weekly