Time and Materials

Time and Materials is a poetry collection by Robert Hass, his first in about a decade when it appeared in 2007. The poems are rooted in the physical world and in the unsettled mood of American life in the early 2000s. Familiar Hass landscapes return, including San Francisco, the Northern California coast and the Sierra high country, along with long-running concerns such as art, nature, desire, domestic life, the violence of history and the power and limits of language. The collection also travels further afield, to Berlin, the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, Bangkok and Paris, and it includes poems responding to painters such as Vermeer and Gerhard Richter and to writers Hass admires, among them Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Tranströmer. Memory and the passage of time run throughout. It won the 2007 National Book Award for Poetry.