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."