‘The Apple Trees at Olema’ Displays Poet Hass’s Scientific Eye

“One of the things / he believed was that our poems could be better / than our motives. So who cares why / he wrote those lines about the hairstyle / of his piano teacher in Wilno in the 1920s / or the building with spumy baroque cornices / that collapsed on her in 1942,” poet Robert Hass writes in one of his latest sequences of poems, “July Notebook: The Birds.” In his newest collection, “The Apple Trees at Olema,” Hass’s poetry and motives seem to be entirely in sync. His careful observations of the world around him show a mind aiming to portray the most beautiful aspects of life.

This latest collection of new and selected poems provides an opportunity to take a retrospective look at his greatest works—recipients of decorations from the National Book Award to the Pulitzer Prize—from the past few decades. The book gathers Hass’s first five collections of poetry—“Field Guides,” “Praise,” “Human Wishes,” “Sun Under Wood,” and “Time and Materials,” and also includes a modest 40-page collection of brand new poems.

Hass’s poetry remains as accomplished as ever. Like much of Hass’s previous work, the new poems included in “The Apple Trees at Olema” are devoted to the nuances of day-to-day life. The section of new work includes three poetic suites that are entitled “July Notebook: The Birds,” “August Notebook: A Death,” and “September Notebook: Stories.” It is as though Hass were a keen, observant scientist, jotting down the results of his studies in his personal notebooks. His focus shifts back and forth from the specific details of nature to the personal narratives of characters in his poems.

When he details the mechanisms of the natural world, Hass attempts to draw connections between nature and the world of human emotion. In the poem “Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey” Hass opens by precisely describing the formation of a dune: “twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. On the leeward side / the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees....”

As the poem continues, Hass widens the scope of his lens. The dune moves, he writes, in a “grand slow march / across the earth’s surface,” which “has an external counterpart in the scouring / movement of glaciers.” As he explores the layers of fractals in nature, the poet sees similar shapes and motion in the patterns of human feelings. He notices “The movement of grief / which has something in it of the desert’s bareness / and of its distances.”

Although most of the new poems in “The Apple Trees at Olema,” are more or less narratives, Hass’s eye for detail in his portrayals of human relationships is just as keen as in his more scientifically based descriptions of nature. “Some of David’s Story” tells the account of a man named David as he falls in and out of love with his former lover. By specifying the name of this character and by including details throughout the poem, such as the specific kind of wines David discusses with his lover’s father, Hass brings to life what might otherwise be a somewhat mundane love story.

The poet manages to represent the dialogue between David and the woman he loves with similar precision: “at the party, she said, / ‘I have an English father and an American mother.../ and at some point I had to choose, so I moved back to London and became the sort of person / who says puh-son instead of purr-son.” Hass carefully details the small stories of each of the characters who appear throughout his poems. This ability to create a convincing narrative seems to be, according to Hass, important for poets. After all, in “August Notebooks: A Death,” he claims that “the most reliable stories... are the ones the poets tell.”

Although Hass’s section of new poems does not seem as polished and schematized as the segments selected from his previous collections, its slightly rougher quality helps the poet present his work as if he were giving his reader a privileged view into his private journals. The new poems of “The Apple Trees at Olema” show that Robert Hass continues to write verse that approaches both the natural and the human world with a close, scientific eye. This new collection is a celebration of the beauty he finds in the order of both human and non-human life.