Review: The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass

Robert Hass’ latest work appears inseparable from his previous collections. The Apple Trees at Olema is a more interesting title than New and Collected Poems, but the new poems lack the full-bodied mastery of 2005’s Time and Materials. Still, this is Hass’ first collected works, frosted with new and worthy poetry, so you should buy it or download it or whatever.

There are nine new poems, and most of them are long enough to be broken into sections. Many are stories or long selections from notebooks. While they do not feel as though Hass has fully digested them, they bear his steady voice and keen observation. Hass’ work has always tended to be narrative, and his new poems verge on being short stories. An interesting shift is that they are other people’s stories, yet they pick up on themes scattered across his previous work: heartbreak, the death of his cocaine addicted brother, his alcoholic mother, divorce, love, birdsong, trees.

The new poems once again betray his indebtedness to Czeslaw Milosz. Until his death in 2004, Milosz, an expatriate Lithuanian, was Hass’ colleague at Berkeley and Nobel Laureate in 1980. The Apple Trees at Olema offers new readers a chance to see Milosz influence take root in Human Wishes and blossom in Sun under Wood and Time and Materials. Hass poems become focused and specific in their targets: conversations, thoughts, aspens and the limits of language. Hass has always been fascinated with nature, but never makes it a spiritual force. Though Milosz has steadied his voice, he has not made Hass in his image as a metaphysical poet. Hass new poems show him to be even more of a reductionist, amazed at the biological outerworking of nature in human emotions and behavior. His new poem “Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey” could almost be a passage in a textbook describing the formation of dunes:

“Viewed in cross section, sand dunes display a characteristic profile.
On the windward side the angle of ascent is low and gradual—

twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. On the leeward side
the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees…”

After an exhaustive description, he describes the movement of dunes to glaciers and then, in the final lines of the poem:

“The movement of grief,
which has something in it of the desert’s bareness
and of its distances.”

At his best, Hass constructs delicate, precise descriptions of the natural world and then uses them to stab us in the heart. He reminds us that we are more connected to each other and to nature than we want to believe. Or he gives delicate, precise descriptions of our lives: barren, without metaphysical trappings or transcendent motivations, but full of compassion against an underlying nothing. It is the nothing that his mentor Milosz fought. It is a nothing Hass feels he cannot evade, yet his writing is full of abundant life. Perhaps it is in quiet defiance.