SOURCE: A review of Praise, in the New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1980, pp. 15, 43.

In the following excerpt, Kalstone comments favorably on the sequence "Songs to Survive the Summer" but observes that Praise as a whole is an uneven work.

One of the tests for good poets these days seems to be whether they can take the leap from writing accomplished short poems to building longer structures, refigure their isolated lyric discoveries as part of a larger tissue of inquiry…. Robert Hass—though on a small scale—[does so successfully] in the sequence, "Songs to Survive the Summer" that closes his new book, Praise. Perhaps it's no accident that the poem … is addressed to a young daughter in whose presence her father is made to feel "This is my life, / time islanded / in poems of dwindled time." The songs are triggered by what he and his daughter hear...