Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Michael Robbins’s review of Robert Hass’s New and Selected Poems reminded me of Stanley Kunitz’s introduction to Hass’s Field Guide. Kunitz admires “the scrupulous purity of [Hass’s] observation” and quotes a few lines from “one of the most buoyant and delightful of [Hass’s] lyrics,” “Song,” to prove his point. Robbins quotes the same lines and says of them: “This isn’t poetry, it’s a list of stuff in Hass’s kitchen.” Well, to choose between Kunitz’s reading and Robbins’s is, to use some of that language Robbins likes, a no-brainer.