A Third Commonness

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 landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage.

Hass weaves histories with the boundless hand of a passionate reader inseparable from literary vitality. Hass revels at genius, saying, Here it is, this stretch of it. Sometimes with a requiem, other times with romance or political reckoning, Hass returns to the amazements of a poetry that encounters itself over and again, beckoned into being by some 'propelling force'.

'Hass personalizes everything, warms everything up. He's an open book; but he's also someone whom readers should, in every sense of the phrase, keep their eye on.' – The New Yorker

'The book isn't merely a master class on form. It's a jump-starter for that most necessary of tools for the artist or lover of art, if not for everyone: the sensibility.' – Craig Teicher, New York Times

'Paying deep attention is clearly Hass' way of honoring the subjects that compel him...This is a book of wide-awake, erudite prayer.' – Gayle Brandeis, SFGate

'Vietnam, Iraq, Dostoyevsky's characters, dishes of raspberry and chocolate, a gardener who once worked for Emily Dickinson, and many more images are here developed in Hass's richly allusive mind.' – James Naiden, Rain Taxi

'These poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture.' – National Book Foundation

'Hass seems to suggest we may hope for more: poetry, being inherently political, may help us grasp and appreciate the reality of what we are doing and of what can and must be done.' – Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle

'A remarkable volume of poems...Field Guide is a means of naming things, of establishing an identity through one's surroundings, of translating the natural world into one's private history.' – Southwest Review