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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 treat 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—much like an essay—embodies 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.
Author's Note ix
I A Miscellany of Short Pieces to Begin
Wallace Stevens in the World 3
Chekhov's Anger 14
Howl at Fifty 32
The Kingdom of Reversals: Notes on Hosoe's Mishima 40
George Oppen: His Art 52
Ernesto Cardenal: A Nicaraguan Poet's Beginnings 60
II A Longer Essay on Literature and War
Study War No More: Violence, Literature, and Immanuel Kant 69
III Some California Writers
Jack London in His Time: Martin Eden 97
Mary Austin and The Land of Little Rain 115
The Fury of Robinson Jeffers 129
William Everson: Some Glimpses 150
Maxine Hong Kingston: Notes on a Woman Warrior 156
IV Poets and the World
Ko Un and Korean Poetry 165
Milosz at Eighty 179
Milosz at Ninety-three 186
Poetry and Terror: Some Notes on Coming to Jakarta 191
Zukofsky at the Outset 219
Tomaz Šalamun: An Introduction 251
A Bruised Sky: Two Chinese Poets 265
V Two Essays on Literature and Religion
Reflections on the Epistles of John 277
Notes on Poetry and Spirituality 291
VI Three Photographers and Their Landscapes Robert Adams and Los Angeles 305
Robert Buelteman and the Coast Range 317
Laura McPhee and the River of No Return 324
VII Three Essays on (Mainly) American Poetry
On Teaching Poetry 341
Families and Prisons 363
Edward Taylor: How American Poetry Got Started 383
VIII Imagining the Earth
Cormac McCarthy's Trilogy; or, The Puritan Conscience and the Mexican Dark 421
Black Nature 432
Rivers and Stories: An Introduction 450
An Oak Grove 459
Acknowledgments 477
Overview
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...