What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World
About this ebook
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”
In this essential collection for readers and writers, Hass demonstrates the essay as an act of attention, turning his remarkable eye to:
- Poetry Analysis: Close readings of poets from Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy, exploring how poetry is made and what it does.
- The Art of Photography: In-depth essays on landscape photographers like Robert Adams, considering how we see and imagine the earth through the camera’s lens.
- Literature and Place: An exploration of California's literary landscape through the work of regional masters like Jack London, Mary Austin, and Robinson Jeffers.
- The Essay as a Form: A powerful demonstration of the essay as a search for meaning, moving from literature and war to the quiet epiphanies of the natural world.
Discover more
About the author
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
