[Robert Hass's first book, Field Guide,] was intelligent and well-crafted; it tapped Hass's power of observation carefully and engagingly. My reservations about this earlier book stemmed from some sense of chilliness that seemed to pervade a number of poems, as if the poems were wrought by an intellect distant from its subject matter. I have no such problems with Praise, Hass's second collection. In fact, Praise contains four or five of the most moving poems I've read in years, and marks Hass's arrival as an important, even pivotal, young poet…. [It] might even be the strongest collection of poems to come out in the late seventies.

Hass's intelligence is still abundantly evident, but it is now tempered with a kind of tonal control and release. The poems are often melancholy and meditative arguments, dialectical processes which work themselves out through qualification, extension, and contradiction. The strongest poems in...