Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 David Wyatt (bio) Robert Hass , Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (HarperCollins, 2007), 96 pp. In Robert Hass's "Then Time," "a man and a woman / have been making love for hours." The poet extends the interval for seventeen lines, and then writes: "Years later, in another city." The time jump tells us what has happened; the love has ended. Hence the title, "Then Time." We get the moment of passion—but then, time. Poetry can achieve only a momentary stay, just as passion temporarily braves time. The rest is expectation and gratitude. Hass has long been a poet of the believable erotic encounter. He also writes convincingly about the ebbing and returning of married love. "Joy seized me," he exclaims in an early poem in Field Guide, as if in an unlooked-for moment he suddenly remembers his love for his wife. Now, over thirty years later, the partners have changed, but the longing goes on. "Longing, we say," Hass once wrote, "because desire is full / of endless distances." Hass prefers the word "longing" to the word "desire," not only because it sounds better in a poem but because of the pun buried within the word and also because it gestures toward states of being we can never quite reach. Longing is always with us, even in the sexual clutch, a "wild thing . . . Here and gone." There had been a kind of rage about the passingness of such experience. But now, in Time and Materials, as Hass approaches seventy, he appears more drawn to the then than the now, as the woman having dinner with her one-time lover finds herself "moved . . . by what he was to her." There is a recurrence in these new poems of feeling "grateful afterward." Longing persists because, as experience happens, it is also always ending. What was—that? we might say about life. Life becomes the elusive, mysterious "it," as Stevens writes in "A Primitive Like an Orb," an "it" catchable, perhaps, only in poetry: It is and itIs not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,The breadth of an accelerando moves,Captives the being, widens—and was there. Like any poet, Hass tries, and fails, to position himself in the space of that dash, in the all that cannot be said. How nice it would be "to render time," Hass muses, and stand outsideThe horizontal rush of it, for a momentTo have the sensation of standing outsideThe greenish rush of it. [End Page 513] But only painters get to to do this; hence the fascination in these poems with Richter, Vermeer, Hopper, Degas, and Renoir. The painter's materials, which create an apprehensible spatial form, are necessarily different from the poet's, who works with words, each one successive, and "their disposition on the page." "The painter gets to behave like time," Hass writes, but the poet must behave in time. With Marvell or Donne, Hass approaches the experience of sexual love as structured around an enduring tension between intensity and lastingness. The lovers in "Then Time" can make love for hours precisely because there will be so few of them. "We never existed inside time," the woman later tells the man. In "Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly)," Hass explores another model for love, one more reconciled to the rhythms of continuance. A man and a woman, perhaps a husband and wife, have been making love on a beach. The poem begins in the middle of a post-coital exchange: How much damage do you think we do,Making love this way when we can hardly standEach other?—I can stand you. You're the rare personI can always stand.—Well, yes, but you know what I mean.—-I'm not sure I do. I think I'm more light-heartedabout sex than you are. I think it's a little tiresometo treat it like a fucking sacrament.—Not much of a pun.—Not much. The couple continues to talk and touch and, as the poem ends, put on their clothes: (She kisses his cheekbone.He squirms into his trunks.) A dialogue poem structured...