SOURCE: A review of Field Guide, in Southwest Review, Summer, 1975, pp. 307-11.

In the following review, Waters praises Hass's defi "translation" of both nature and personal history in Field Guide.

Field Guide is both the poet 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...