Robert Hass
The Apple Trees at Olema
Ecco, 2010
368 Pages
£15.00
ISBN 978-0061923821

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Robert Hass is a major voice in American letters, having won nearly every literary award for both his poems and his literary criticism. His new book, The Apple Trees at Olema, is without a doubt his most remarkable, gathering large selections from his previous five books of poetry: Field Guide (1973), Praise (1979), Human Wishes (1989), Sun Under Wood (1996), and Time and Materials (2007). Being so comprehensive, The Apple Trees at Olema not only showcases Hass’s finest work from each past volume, but also retains each collection’s individual integrity as an artistic whole.

The Apple Trees at Olema opens with several new poems, many of which mimic the scattered, fragmentary, observational form of notebook entries. This fractured verse meanders and flits, interrupting descriptive scenes with the occasional philosophical and personal interjection. This results in searching, meditative narratives that often demand much metaphysical reflection. The poems are complex and develop in layers, as in the volume’s opening poem, “July Notebook: The Birds”:

There are four kind of birdsong outside
and a methodical early morning saw.
No, not a saw, It’s a boy on a scooter and the sun
on his black helmet is concentrated to a point of glowing light.

When perception is solely aural, a saw is heard. However, when sight is juxtaposed with aurality, the sound of a saw becomes the body of a boy riding a scooter in the early light. This precise image seems almost frozen like a photograph or painting. But the glowing light gives it a dramatic, almost metaphysical property, as if yet another remarkable synaesthetic transformation is about to occur. Hass addresses this expectation of possible transfiguration with a philosophical interjection:

He isn’t death come to get us
and he isn’t truth arriving in a black T-shirt
chevroned up the arms in tongues of flame.

The figure of the boy does not suggest some grand ontological meaning. He is merely himself: a boy, who was once a saw. Since he is now a boy on a scooter, since the light glows concentrically on his helmet, and since he too, like the saw, may be on the edge of transformation, he is beautiful. Hass’s poetic images are too intricate and ripe with possibility to be whittled down to gauche life-or-death interpretative paradigms.

This complexity of symbolism also features in the collection’s title poem, which comes from Hass’s third collection, Human Wishes. An apple tree elicits polarized emotions from its observer:

Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh
of appetite in the cold white blossoms
that had startled her. Now they seem tender
and where she was repelled she takes the measure
of the trees and lets them in.

Like so many of Hass’s finest poems, this is a meditation on love, desire, and time’s tug on both; the apple trees provide the perfect mirror for the characters’ and the narrator’s interior landscapes. This is further evidence that, for Hass, nature is never merely a fixed ornamental flourish but an intricate and detailed reflection and projection of the human psyche. The way the characters briefly respond to the sight of the forgotten trees (“He could be knocking wildly at a closed door / in a dream”) builds tension and offers glimpses into their absent narratives. The narrator’s own interjection (“If it is afternoon, a thing moon of my own dismay / fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them”) adds a further dimension to the poem, one that is characteristic of Hass’s work: the overt acknowledgment that the poem is the work of an imaginative creator. In the poem quoted above, Hass even engages the reader in conversation: “You are awake now?” and “Are you there?” At times he responds for the reader: “I am awake now.” The result is an unashamed admission that poems are constructions of the human imagination, that they are concerned with artifice as much as they are concerned with truth.

The co-existence of the real and imaginary calls to mind another beautiful line, again from “July Notebook: The Birds”:

Are you there? Maybe it would be best
to be the shadow of a pine needle
on a midsummer morning
(to be in imagination and for a while
on a midsummer morning
the shadow side of a pine needle)

To be in imagination is not to be the physical self that we embody within reality, but to be the metaphyisical manifestation of the self that is envisioned by the creative mind. To be poetically rendered as a slim shadow of a pine needle. “Yes,” the reader can hear himself respond, “yes, to be a shadowy replica of pine needle, that would be best.” This imaginary space is comforting, providing a restful reprieve from ordinary life. And Hass, by addressing us, invites us to join him in this space.

Re-reading Hass’s poems reminds me of the time I was first introduced to his poetry at the 2004 Academy of American Poets reading in New York, where he read “Bush’s War”, later to be published in Time and Materials. I remember hearing the title and sighing, expecting some trite, overwrought political tirade against a war and administration toward which poetic response had often seemed belabored. Instead, the poem was a complex, meandering meditation on the nature and history of war and its effects on the body (individual and collective, personal and political). As nature appears to flourish and “Black European thrushes,/ Shiver the sun up / As if they were shaking a great tangle / Of Golden wire” Hass reminds us that “it is a trick of the mind/ That the past seems just ahead of us” and the reader/listener is suddenly propelled into a series of harrowing historical visions:

Flash forward: firebombing of Hamburg,
Fifty thousand dead in a single night,
‘The children’s bodies the next day
Set in the street in rows like a market
In charred chicken.’ Flash forward:
Firebombing in Tokyo, a hundred thousand
In a night

The insertions soon drop the “forward”, further highlighting their association with the rapidity of gunfire:

Flash: Hiroshima
Flash: Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt,
The train lurching and the stomach woozy
Past the displays of falls of hair, the piles
of monogrammed valises, spectacles

These descriptions resist sentimentality, relating details only, in newsreel fashion, and this makes them all the more powerful and horrific. This continues for over a page. Then comes a rumination on motive that positions the manipulation and marketing of people’s emotions as the catalyst for war:

Why do we do it? Certainly there’s a rage
to injure what’s injured us. Wars
are always pitched to us that way.
The well-paid newsreaders read the reasons
On the air. And the us who are injured,
Or have been convinced we are injured,
Are always identified with virtue. It’s
That—the rage to hurt mixed up
With self-righteousness—that’s murderous.

An overt political stance is usually damaging to a poem, degrading it into the author’s personal soapbox. What Hass creates here, however, is not just polemical political speech, but a complex meditation on political and social coercion, and also on the possibility of the reader’s cooperation. Thrust into the harrowing imagery of the past few lines, the reader is undoubtedly emotionally exhausted and angry, and Hass’s warning of the dangers of rage and unchecked emotion is a powerful rebuttal to the reader’s own possible murderous thoughts. Thus we are all implicated in the devastating narrative of war.

It is a delight to have the majority of Hass’s poems at one’s fingertips, though sometimes it does seem a bit overwhelming. Perhaps this is the greatest compliment one could offer Hass: that his poems demand to be read over and over, that they are sprawling, exhaustive, and enormous, that they are self-contained worlds, microcosmic parts that give us astounding glimpses of the whole.

Erik Fuhrer graduated in 2009 with an MLitt in Modernities from the University of Glasgow. He currently resides in New York.

Adrienne Rich
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society
W.W. Norton & Company, 2009
208 Pages
£11.99
ISBN 978-0393070064

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Adrienne Rich’s latest volume of essays, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, gathers short lectures, prefaces, and reviews written and published between 1997 and 2008. Emphasising social awareness and engagement as the critical aims of art, these essays reflect Rich’s lifelong struggle to integrate political conscience with artistic creation.

Rich has been a major voice in poetry ever since W.H. Auden selected her debut  collection, A Change of World (1951), for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Yet while the poems in this volume were remarkable in many ways, it was not until Diving into the Wreck, published in 1973 and winner of the National Book Award, that Rich gained canonical status. She is known not only as a poet—she has received nearly every major American poetry award—but also as a cultural critic and activist, and has been an outspoken participant in feminist and anti-war movements.

“A Human Eye”, her 29th book, takes its title from Karl Marx’s “Private Property and Communism”, which Rich quotes in her foreword: “the eye has become a human eye only when its object has become a human, social object.” She adds, “When art—as language, music, or in palpable, physically present silence—can induce that kind of seeing, holding and responding, it can restore us to our senses.” Whether dealing with Jewish identity, translation of Iraqi poetry, poets like Muriel Rukeyser and LeRoi Jones, or Marx himself, Rich’s commentary is always rooted in the ways art can, or should, reawaken our numbed consciousnesses to levels of physical and cultural awareness.

Art’s purpose, in other words, is to uncommodify the gaze, to replace the eye’s need to own an object with the eye’s need to “see” it and understand its unique physicality. This ideology of blending politics, poetics, and the body echoes lines from “The Demon Lover”, an early poem published in Leaflets (1969): “Only where there is language is there world/ In the harp of my hair, compose me a song.” Reality as language, language as physical act, whether by lips, or touch, or both.

Rich’s work has always aimed to discern real “truth” from the “truths” presented to us by the dominant capitalist discourse. This aim is nowhere more apparent than in her groundbreaking poem, “Diving into the Wreck”, in which she encases her flesh in “body-armor of black rubber/ the absurd flippers/ the grave and awkward mask” and dives into the deep searching for “the wreck itself and not the story of the wreck.” This wreck is both metaphorical and literal, representing not only the wrecks of history and culture, but the wreck of the body itself. Holding “a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear”, she sets herself the task of writing her body—and the bodies of the dispossessed implicit in the word “our”—back into the language and thus back into the world.

This was also the task of her eminent essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, a deliberate attempt to write lesbians into feminist discourse, and it remains the task of A Human Eye. Perhaps the greatest example of this can be found in her essay, “Jewish Days and Nights”, in which she characterises “true” Jewishness as being variegated in nature, insisting that “diaspora—a multi-faceted condition—means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews.” To follow this “truth” would be to dive into the wreck and discover bodies and voices not represented by dominant Jewish, especially American Jewish, discourse. She laments the highjacking of Jewish culture by fundamentalists groups, which she finds antithetical to “true” Jewish teaching.

Judaism envisioned in this way as something plural and shifting rather than fixed reflects the necessity of transmission within and between cultures. Rich further addresses this necessity in the preceding essay, Iraqi Poetry Today, where she interrogates the politics of translation with a battery of suggestive questions: “whose poetry is translated, from and into what languages, what of the poetry actually translated can get published and receive international distribution, what poets (and what poetics) are disseminated, and who decides these matters?” These inquiries beget others relating to the authenticity and trustworthiness of the translation. Beneath it all lies the question: what bodies are being left behind in the wreckage?

For Rich, poetry is in part untranslatable, “unmistakably human as the human face yet varied as faces are.” At the same time, the act of translation is a bodily event: it is to “make love with a new person, in a different body.” This romance can yield beauty and even understanding, though that understanding will always remain imperfect. Rich is wary of the pitfalls of translation yet conceives of it as a powerful vehicle for the dissemination of difference (of cultures, of bodies, of politics) that we must dive into in order to rescue individual and collective bodies from the wreckage.

Perhaps the most rewarding parts of Rich’s collection are those in which she allows other voices to speak. She is fond of presenting full quotations, laying the whole bodies of poems down in the middle of her text to converse with it, merge with it, and transform it. She is not afraid to pull back and allow other poems to deliver their own individual impact, without the distraction of her critical commentary. She also delights in exposing readers to poems which they might have never encountered; though LeRoi Jones (better known by his adopted name, Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin, and Walt Whitman may be household names to most readers, poets such as Thomas Avena, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Fawzi Karim, Nazik alMala’ika, Shulamith Hareven, Edmond Jabès, June Jordan, Judy Grahn, Yannis Ritsos, Dennis Brutus, and Rami Saari might not be.

Similarly, the social critics whom she quotes, such as  Che Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg are probably best known to many readers by name alone. Even Karl Marx is represented by less popular quotations (such as that referenced in Rich’s title),  thereby offering most readers “new” material from a major figure. Rich’s project is to rescue these figures and their bodies of work from the wreck, to restore them to the surface.

A Human Eye is an essential text that carries Rich’s joint political and artistic project into the 21st century. The essays included in this volume teach us to see differently, to think differently. Rich writes, “Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody—make into flesh—another principle. A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.” Rich herself has always provided us with this type of poetry, and these essays continue this legacy. Her voice is never self-important or self-involved, it never claims absolute authority; rather, it takes every chance to relinquish authority in the service of a greater and more impactful inclusiveness. Everything should be questioned; everyone should be given a voice. To read Rich’s new volume is to share in a communion of voices ranging from the forgotten to the dispossessed, who are all struggling, along with Rich, to be heard. Rich’s eye gazes on them all, and they all gaze back; survivors of the wreck, left out of the book of myths, but written here.

Erik Fuhrer received an MLitt from the University of Glasgow in 2009. He wrote his dissertation on Virginia Woolf.