On Poetry - Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire - NYTimes.com

On Poetry - Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire - NYTimes.com: "Hass’s greatest strength as a poet, however, is his equanimity, a quality that sets him apart from peers who rely on a sense of imbalance. That imbalance can register as pressure (that is, the language of the poem may seem inadequate to the task it’s asked to perform), or it can involve deliberate disjunctions in voice, tone, syntax and so forth. Reading a good Hass poem, though, is like watching a painter whose brush strokes are so reassuringly steady you hardly notice how much complex and unsettling depth has been added to the canvas."