140 contemporary poetry
The poem is dedicated to Mariana Richardson ( 1830 – 91 ), whose
‘father owned the land / where I grew up’ (p. 25 ). John Fremont
and Kit Carson seized the land in Palo Alto during the US–
Mexican War ( 1846 – 8 ). Given this historical context, Hass’s reso-
lute naming of what he sees can seem a sinister act of ownership.
But when this adumbration of the landscape is performed near
the close of the poem: ‘sedge, fl ag, owl’s clover, / rotting wharves’
situated near a tank which ‘lugs silver / bomb-shaped napalm tins’
(p. 27 ), the impression and tone are distinctly different. Hass
makes a link here with the untamed beauty of the marshes and the
traffi c of naplam to another, if remote, confl ict in Vietnam. His
sympathy with Richardson is emphasised at the poem’s close:
Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description.
Again, almost with yearning
I see the malice of her ancient eyes (p. 27 )Here Hass criticises himself for what Ralph Waldo Emerson
termed ‘the tyranny of the eye’ and what the poem refers to as ‘the
lobotomy of description’. The lure of taxonomy and the dissection
of the landscape with a naturalist’s eye fi nd a shift in relations in
Hass’s second volume Praise ( 1979 ).^18
Edward Casey stresses that ‘Places are not so much the direct
objects of sight or thought or recollection as what we feel with
and around, under and above, before and behind’.^19 While Hass’s
‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ is set in Marin County, the landscape
of the poem forms the basis for an enquiry into the mechanics
of language. Whereas Field Guide displays nostalgia for a naive
relationship between language and the world (an Edenic state of
taxonomy), ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ intently assesses the role
of language as a transparent vehicle of representation. Hass com-
ments that his poem was read as a criticism of poststructuralism, in
particular Derridean différance:
There was a time when people took my work to be dumber
than it was... Readings of Praise? A lot of people were ter-