SOURCE: A review of Field Guide, in Best Sellers, Vol. 33, No. 8, July 15, 1973, pp. 178-79.

In the following review, Fahey criticizes Field Guide as self-consciously poetic, grounded in "ideas" and not in "words."

The Yale Series of Younger Poets (e.g. anyone under forty and not yet published) has discovered some fine poets; most notably James Tate and recently Judith Johnson Sherwin for Uranium Poems, and Michael Casy for his acclaimed work, Obscenities. This year's winning volume has been described by Stanley Kunitz, the judge of the competition, as like "stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from the air." I find this compliment for Robert Hass's Field Guide accurate but in the pejorative sense.

One can easily fall into Robert Hass's poems and land not knowing what went by, and that, I feel is not an admirable quality. The work is...