Summer Snow by Robert Hass New York:  Ecco Books 2020,  178 pp

In Robert Hass's recent book of poetry, Summer Snow, we experience a culmination of the influences that have informed his work for decades, and given that he may be the foremost poet in the western United States, it is worth discussing his work in the context of how the West, and California in particular, looks now in 2021, and whether there is still a West Coast literary esthetic, and which of its traditions continue.

To begin with, Hass's book is eclectic, which of course reflects the complexity of this state at the terminus of the western movement, a state that has absorbed so many seekers, so many cultures, and in the fusion of them, begun so many trends. It is a testament to Hass's skill and scholarship that he is able to utilize a variety of styles expertly yet freshly, old yet new … plucked from traditions and re-perfected. Some of the poems are tight evocations of sense experience and draw from Asian poetry and philosophies, which are as bountiful in California as anywhere in America. Other poems are long-lined extensions of breath, in the manner of Whitman, reflecting in their style and yearning the pioneer, common-man spirit that continues to echo primarily from the expansive 19th Century.

But Hass can also employ the surrealism of early 20th Century erudite Europe, which, when it works, triggers unconscious recognitions in the minds in which it lands. He also, quite poignantly, draws from our long foreground, going so far as to recreate an old English ballad to convey the brutality and glory of a medieval culture that thrived on honor and mysticism, before the advent of the Renaissance and the ascension of reason.

Per that ascension, there is also science in Hass's poems — zoology and botany and ornithology and paleontology — to give the world beyond

humans its due. Hass is devoted to the truth of the natural world in the tradition of one of Western poetry's icons, Gary Snyder, as well as in the calm,