| Abstrakt: |
The publication of a volume of selected poems is an appropriate occasion to appraise a poet's career, and an equally appropriate occasion to wonder why we use the word ''career'' in connection with poetry at all. Many readers would agree with Randall Jarrell's definition of a poet as someone ''who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.'' This assumes that writing poetry is mostly a matter of waiting and hoping, which in turn raises questions about how confident we can be in discussing (to say nothing of criticizing) a poet's development. As long as the writer in question makes a valiant effort to prepare himself for revelation -- as long as he greets every raindrop by waving a putter, like Bishop Pickering in ''Caddyshack'' -- is it really his fault if the lightning striketh not? Robert Hass's book THE APPLE TREES AT OLEMA: New and Selected Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.99) is a milestone in what is generally regarded as one of the more successful careers (that word again) in contemporary American poetry. Hass won the Yale Younger Poets competition with his first book, ''Field Guide,'' in 1972; since then he's picked up a MacArthur ''genius'' fellowship, two National Book Critics Circle awards (once for poetry, once for criticism), the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the United States poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, has been a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has translated haiku selections from Basho, Buson and Issa, as well as numerous books by the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, his former Berkeley colleague. As poetic resumes go, Hass's is about as gold-plated as it gets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
