Field Guide is both the poet [Robert Hass] and his remarkable volume of poems, a tour through the America of his historical and political consciousness, his vast privacy of landscape. In a "Letter" to his wife he states: "I have believed so long/in the magic of names and poems." This belief extends his geography past any coastal boundary, and his vision telescopes through love for his family to focus with "an ancient/imagination" on "what is familiar/felt along the flesh."

The purpose of the book, then, is to name these feelings, the undercurrent that flashes through "the pulse/that forms these lines." There are three sections. The first, "The Coast," is set in California, the last frontier. Hass is fascinated by his woman and the land, and his marriage to both evokes a timelessness, a sense of ancestral memory. (p. 307)

[He] creates a beauty by working...