Now and Then The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000

All through the book readers are invited to the quiet and intensity of reading, not exactly as if it were the blessed water in a medieval baptismal font in an old church, the entire violence of the world carved onto the outside of the font-that is the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's figure for the wish of poetry-but something more like a haiku of the eighteenth-century master Buson. It is a poem about a particular kind of Book of Hours, a cheaply printed, cheaply bound farmer's almanac. The poem goes like this: This old almanac, Gladdens my heart, Like a sutra.

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Ebenkamp previously edited the Counterpoint title The Etiquette of Freedom, a conversation with Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder and Song of Myself, a collection of poems from Walt Whitman. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.