The new work of Robert Hass, one of our foremost younger poets, shows what sacrifices immediacy requires. His second book, Praise …, has an architectural grandeur that even his nearly flawless first volume, Field Guide, did not aim at. Poem after poem sets limits for itself as stern as gravity: white on white, block on block of stone, frames around pictures. The very motionlessness of the visual arts plays a part in Hass's aesthetic ("It's an advantage of paintings"), as do the minutiae of nature….

Hass's poetic intelligence is so acute that he keeps, like Hamlet, cerebrating himself into the static condition, which turns out to be all that his verbs will allow him. His poems too seldom break out of the straight subject-predicate construction. They keep getting stuck in the is-ness of situations. It is not surprising that he concentrates upon pictures, paintings, sculptures, motionless images, even in...