Spiegelman Introduces Robert Hahn's Poetry Robert Hahn Robert Hahn writes poems for grown-ups. All Clear, in the new James Dickey series edited by Richard Howard and published by the University of South Carolina Press, reproduces a myriad of things visible to mortal sight. Hahn looks diligently and with concentrated intelligence at nature and at art. He then goes on to contemplate all the relations between what we see and what we do not. Beneath a tone of Apollonian coolness abides a spring of rich Dionysian passion.
Observation comes to mean both notice and participation.
His poems, always elegant but never merely so, possess good humor, energy, and a thrilling commitment to almost everything in the world except the poet's own inner psyche. Hahn, mercifully, does without confession, egomania, surrealism, and the cannibalizing of friends and family. Even when he is anecdotal, a reader is aware of the organizing form that lifts the details of ordinary life into an artistic plot. Hahn knows what form can do, and what he can do with it. Where younger poets may cut their teeth on sonnets, villanelles, and so forth, Hahn has the audacity to include two brilliant sestinas that attest, above or beneath their charming refinements, to metaphysical questions and to the pathos of dying.