A Third Commonness

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In A Third Commonness, US Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves histories with the boundless hand of a passionate reader inseparable from literary vitality. Hass revels at genius, saying, Here it is, this stretch of it. Sometimes with a requiem, other times with romance or political reckoning, Hass returns to the amazements of a poetry that encounters itself over and again, beckoned into being by some "propelling force."