Thursday, April 22, 2010

Robert Hass

He was born in San Francisco on March 1, 1941. His books of poetry include Time and Materials (2007), which won the 2007 National book Award; Sun under wood: New poems (1996); Human Wishes (1989); and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series.
About Hass’s work, Kunitz wrote, “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, which you have entered into another element.”
Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Heroic Simile
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai
In the gray rain,
In Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
He fell straight as a pine, he fell
As Ajax fell in Homer
In chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
The woodsman returned for two days
To that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
And on the third day he brought his uncle.
They stacked logs in the resinous air,
Hacking small limbs off,
Tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
Were quartered and still they were awkwardly large
The logs from midtree they halved
Ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
Moons and quarter moons and half moons
Ridged by the saw’s tooth.

I found this poem from on the internet. Robert Hass is the best writer of poem. His poems are usually esoteric meaning. In my opinion, he tried to describe how to attend nature and forest. Nature is alive, of course many people do agree, because it always gives reactions to us if we destroy nature. One day, a person said me that the nature had created mankind, which means, we are creation of nature, and it is God of universe. If there aren’t any animals, mountains, rivers and forest, we couldn’t survive in the world. It is law of nature. I think the person’s right. We have to take care and save our nature like our family, because, the nature is parent of us. If you destroy nature, you are going to receive the great punishment.

No comments:

Post a Comment