Though he has translated the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz and written a critical book (Twentieth Century Pleasures) that received the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, it is for his own musical, descriptive, meditative poetry that Robert Hass is primarily recognized. His impressive literary accomplishments--editorial work, translation, poetry, criticism, reviews--derive from his deep-seated conviction, stated in a spring 1981 interview with David Remnick, that "poetry is a way of living ... a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball." Hass's poetic energy has flowed easily into different forms, and likewise it is stimulated by various, and ordinary, situations. He has been known to turn to a friend, out of breath while both were jogging, to instigate a serious discussion of meter. Identifiable for their heady music, references to nature, art, and literature, and their capacity to disclose the associative, sometimes stumbling-forward quality of human thinking...