Sun Under Wood extends and deepens Hass's ongoing explorations of nature and human history, solitude and the bonds of children, parents, and lovers. Here his passion for apprehending experience with language - for creating experience with language - finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy. Yet Hass's most seductive and indelible lyrics reside in an exquisitely fragile moment: there is a dark undercurrent rising in this text, an increasingly acute sense of mortality in a world "so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing."

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.