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New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week

Field Guide: Robert Hass

The poetry of Robert Hass both delights the senses and seduces the intellect. According to Stanley Kunitz, "Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element. Suddenly the deep is there, with its teeming life." Hass has been awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and is a two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although he says his poems "have no agenda", as US Poet Laureate (1995-97) he broadened the role to include not only his love for poetry but his passion for environmentalism. He currently teaches at the University of California, is an award-winning critic, and is a translator of Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz and the haiku of Basho, Buson and Issa. Small wonder, then, that his poems capture both the brightness of the world and its vanishing.

Chair: Professor Bill Manhire

Also appears in:

The Sound of Places and Names

Thu 16 Mar, 12.10pm

The National Bank Festival Club

Destinations

Sun 19 Mar, 2.45pm

Embassy Theatre

Concession Pass to 15 Writers Upfront sessions of your choice: $150 [FR $140]

If this event interests you, you may also like Simon Armitage, Ronald Wright and Michael Cunningham.

Photo credit: © Rachel C Zucker

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