What Light Can Do

Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world—with accompanying photos throughout.

What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

In this essential collection for readers and writers, Hass demonstrates the essay as an act of attention, turning his remarkable eye to:

• Poetry Analysis: Close readings of poets from Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy, exploring how poetry is made and what it does.
• The Art of Photography: In-depth essays on landscape photographers like Robert Adams, considering how we see and imagine the earth through the camera’s lens.
• Literature and Place: An exploration of California's literary landscape through the work of regional masters like Jack London, Mary Austin, and Robinson Jeffers.
• The Essay as a Form: A powerful demonstration of the essay as a search for meaning, moving from literature and war to the quiet epiphanies of the natural world.