From an early age Robert Hass embraced poetry as a vocation. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area at a time when the poetry community there was the focus of national attention. In a Publishers Weekly interview (28 October 1996) Hass explained to Michael Coffey, “I started out imagining myself as a novelist or essayist, but then Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg came along; and poetry, imbued with the whole lifestyle of the Beats, was much more exciting.” The sense of poetry as a vocation has taken hold in every aspect of his life, for Hass is a poet who insists on the relevance of poetry to the lives people actually lead. In an Iowa Review interview (1991) Hass claimed that “the task of art is to over and over again make images of a livable common life.” His poems have an intimacy that is grounded in lived experience...