Born in San Francisco, Robert Hass has spent much of his life in his home state of California. The beauty of the West Coast has contributed to the themes of nature and sensory experiences present in Hass’s poetry. His collection Sun Under Wood won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997.
More By This Poet
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is,...
After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa
New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.
This moth saw brightness
in a woman’s chamber—
burned to a crisp.
Asked how old he was
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five...