Reviews for The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

The average rating for The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-24 00:00:00 Matthew Lester Read Hass' meter and you hear stories, stories of love, pain, romance, depression, and sexuality. Accessible narratives told through verse, yet you still have the mystery of poetry: Here everything seems clear, firmly etched against the pale smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl's clover, rotting wharves. The collection is divided into a few chapbooks, each book containing its unique aura. Longer poems, like "Some of David's Story,"contained sectioned pauses that I really liked because I could stop to consider the mystery as I brewed a cup of Espresso: She was sitting beside me and I looked at her hands/ in her lap. Her beautiful hands. And I thought about/ the way she was carrying the whole of the world's violence/ and cruelty in her body, or trying to, because/ she thought the rest of us couldn't or wouldn't. I love the way he uses enjambment,the way he uses punctuation, even the way he uses contractions. And what of his subtle description of bad sex: "two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious/startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet/lubricious glue, stare at each other/and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically." I love when the beautiful simplicity of poetry finds you where you are and you discover pieces of yourself within its lines. "Novella" was one of my top picks. The poem is memory and trauma wrapped in soothing lines that flow on the page like a calming lake with riveting waves: When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched/ by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her/ life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-colored/ or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the/ design she was making. Note: I've had to use blockquotes AND line break indicators here because the Goodreads' review spacing automatically strips away at the longer lines found within these stanzas. Urgh.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-21 00:00:00 Jonny Saltvedt I like the poems of Robert Hass because they're so enormous in scope. His poems are large blocks of prose, built like a loaf of bread in which metaphors have been embedded like raisins. I like it that his poems are so developed, so all-encompassing. Hass is like a brilliant dinner conversationalist--he starts in one place but elegantly touches on several ideas before he's finished. Though tightly controlled, it seems a little like verbal improvisation. You think he's lost his way in the poem. But he's not so much making a point as gradually arriving at it so that suddenly you're aware that truth, for instance, is in the eye of the raven, or that knowledge is an act of leaving one way of living to begin another. If every poem is a closed system, it's even more evident with Hass. He begins at one end and somehow walks the tightrope to arrive at the other end. As he walks you realize two things: he's brilliant and he loves everything he writes about. And he sees and writes it all with such gentleness you want each poem to go on. You want to keep biting the loaf, finding every raisin of possibility.