Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.In A Third Commonness, US Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography—from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landsca...

“No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass.”—Atlantic MonthlyThe National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees ...

During his years as Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived a popular 19th–century tradition: including poetry in our daily newspapers. "Poet's Choice" went on to appear as a nationally syndicated column across the country from 1997 to 2000. The column, which featured poems relevant to current headlines, serves as a symbol of the continuing importance of poetry in our daily lives. This collection contains well–known poets such as Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, John Ashbery, and Robert Frost, as we...

Walt Whitman was deeply interested in the American language as it was emerging in his time. He was fascinated by the vocabularies of the sciences and the streets, and was a regular visitor to the New York Public Library, where he loved to peer into the provenience of the words he overheard and read. In this beautiful book, Robert Hass and Paul Ebencamp walk us through Whitman's "Song of Myself"—one of the greatest poems in American literature. Much is revealed about the words Whitman chose...

Black Light is a voyage of discovery and transformation. Set in Iran, it tells the story of Jamshid, a quiet simple carpet mender, who one day suddenly commits a murder and is forced to flee. With this violent act his old life ends and a strange new existence begins.Galway Kinnell combines his gift for precise imagery with a storyteller's skill in this journey across the Iranian desert—away from the fragile self–righteous virtues of adopted moral tradition, into the disord...

“Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert” is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders of this region, Austin generously shares “such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.” Her vivid writings capture the landscape—from burnt hi...

The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag–Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner. With an introduction from Hass and Ebenkamp...

"It's in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear," writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman's insightful memoir. "Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of the living."To ensure that the world of Jimmye Hillman's childhood in Greene County, Mississippi during the Great Depression doesn't slip away, he has gathered together accounts of his family and the other people of Old Washington vi...

Born in 1793, John Clare lived and worked during the Golden Age of British poetry, the time of Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Coleridge. In the grand tradition of English nature writing, he stands alongside Wordsworth as a poet of extraordinary humanity and great spirit. Clare was 18 years old when the first Luddite riots occurred. He was deeply resistant to the first years of England's Enclosure, and he offers a contemporaneous look at what the world was like for those struggling with the imp...

Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal were both poets and priests, wholly committed to a life of spiritual contemplation which was never far from the gritty work that lead them to risk life and reputation in order to raise worldwide consciousness concerning issues of social justice and the abuse of human rights. From the Monastery to the World collects the complete correspondence between these spiritual men and dedicated activists, translated into English for the first time.T...

"This miracle of a book, perhaps the most beautiful group of poetic translations this century has ever produced," (Chicago Tribune) should stand as the definitive English language version.

A revelatory new volume of Robert Frost’s correspondence, illuminating one of America’s most renowned poets at the height of his literary fame and the depths of personal tragedy.By the late 1930s, Robert Frost had achieved bona fide celebrity. He won his third Pulitzer Prize for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he had become an in-demand lecturer nationwide. The penultimate volume of The Letters of Robert Frost—which presents 606 letters, m...