Metapoetry and Etymology: Time and Materials, Robert Hass.

Hass wrote these poems between 1997 and 2005, from the time he was 56 years old to the time he was 64. He still writes plenty about sex, just like he did in earlier books. He also really likes delving into the meaning of words. That's how he winds up with this great ending of the poem "Etymology":

And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons

Had a name for it. They called it silm.

They were navigators. It was also

Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.

His personal narrative poems are really strong. "The World As Will and Representation" is an annoying title for a terrific piece about, I assume, his own childhood, as well as an indelible meditation of past gender roles. Loved it. I loved the one right before that, too, "Breach and Orison," which has lines like

...what

what what, the sprinkler

said

and

plums and apple-pears

the color of halogen 

streetlamps in a puddle.

He has two elegies in here for Czeslaw Milosz, who was a terrific poet and Hass's good friend. One, titled "For Czeslaw Milosz in Krakow," is really lovely. The other, which has a bunch of little fragments inspired by famous paintings, is kind of eh. Hass is a really cultured and literate guy, and I'm not as interested in his imitations of classical poets and that kind of thing, probably because I'm less cultured. But when he writes things like

In Crete once, in the summer...

We sat in a taverna by the water

Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,

Drinking retsina...

I think to myself, Damn, it must be good to be Robert Hass.

I like this guy pretty well, but he is always putting asides and commentary into his poems. Like this:

Maybe

The syntax is a little haywire there.

It drives me crazy. It's like you're watching some really good TV, but the director is in the living room with you and he keeps telling you stuff you don't need to know about each scene and standing up and blocking your view. And you're like, Sit down and be quiet, I'm trying to watch here!  I think that kind of self-consciousness has something to do with postmodernism, but I don't really understand postmodernism, except that I know it's not what I want to do myself.

Hass has some big poems on big subjects in here too. The one called "State of the Planet" is really good, and it's nice to have some science in your poetry. His anti-war poems aren't quite as strong. The best poems I've read about war are by people who have been in the thick of it, like Anna Akhmotova and Paul Celan. Maybe a poem like "Bush's War" is hard to pull off because it's written at a comfortable distance. 

But you've got to give him credit for doing some pretty ambitious things, and I think it's a really good collection overall. Dude did not win the Pulitzer for nothing.