A Third Commonness
Description
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."
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Person
Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary's College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics until his retirement in 2019.