Hass and Strand

From the New Yorker: a review of their new books, their "late poetry" and a career retrospective of each, written by Dan Chiasson:

The imaginations of many American poets were formed in response to boring childhoods (think of John Ashbery on his father’s fruit farm in Sodus, New York, or Lowell overhearing, in “91 Revere Street,” the endless snorts and whinnies of his parents’ quarrels in a Beacon Hill town house), but Strand’s imagination, abstract and remote, seems to have been formed in defiance of a childhood that was a little too stimulating.

A poet capable of bringing thin work to such fine polish, seeing it praised and anthologized, has a choice: bask or run. Hass ran, and therefore his poems of the eighties and nineties sometimes disappointed those readers who were weaned on the vision of the mellow life, part Horace and part haiku, that Hass’s early poems had offered.

It's an interesting essay.