Time and Materials
by Robert Hass
Summary
Time and Materials gathers lyric observation, political reflection, and ecological attention into a wide ranging meditation on what time makes and unmakes, moving between landscape, art, war, and intimate domestic detail without settling into any single register for long. Hass wrote the poems between 1997 and 2005, and the book shows him alternating between prose like blocks and looser free verse, a discursive, essayistic mode that lets a poem think out loud rather than arrive at its subject in a straight line.
The collection reflects a longstanding commitment, built across Hass's whole career, to clarity, ethics, and the natural world, qualities readers of his earlier books will recognize even as this collection pushes further into explicitly political material shaped by the wars of the years it was written in. The poet Stanley Kunitz described the experience of reading Hass as like stepping into ocean water not much different in temperature from the air around it, a way of saying that his plain, exact language never announces its own difficulty even when its subject is genuinely hard. Individual poems return often to specific California landscapes and named details of daily life, keeping even the book's most abstract political reflection tied to a particular, recognizable place rather than a general argument.
Reading Time and Materials means following a poet equally comfortable naming a plant, a painting, or a war, moving easily between registers most poets keep separate. It suits a reader who wants poetry that treats the political and the personal as continuous rather than opposed, written by someone whose attention to the natural world never lets the news of the day crowd it out entirely.
Historical Context & Significance
Time and Materials won the 2007 National Book Award for Poetry and then shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with Philip Schultz's Failure, two full awards given the same year. That year's Pulitzer finalist was Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger.
Hass served as United States Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, using the position to champion literacy, poetry, and ecological awareness, and he wrote a weekly poetry column for The Washington Post until 2000. He has extensively translated the work of Czesław Miłosz and edited versions of classical Japanese haiku masters, work that runs alongside his own poetry throughout his career. Hass received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984 and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2014, and he is married to the poet and activist Brenda Hillman, who teaches at Saint Mary's College.