SOURCE: A review of Human Wishes, in Boston Review, Vol. XIV, No. 6, December, 1989, pp. 28-9.

[In the following review, Barber compares Human Wishes to Hass's earlier work.]

While not quite as rare as a lunar eclipse, a new book of poems by Robert Hass isn't likely to escape notice. In his first two collections, Field Guide (1973) and Praise (1979), Hass helped ignite a running dialogue between the possibilities of the lyric and the demands of the intellect. And the intellect, in his case, seemed to have won out. Over the past decade Hass's prominence has owed less to his distinctively crafted poems than to his determined undertakings as a critic (Twentieth Century Pleasures, a volume of gracefully erudite essays, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984) and translator (most notably, by way of his working partnership with Berkeley neighbor Czeslaw Milosz).

At an age by which...