All morality is banal. To write that war is bad, honesty is the best policy, death imminent for us all is to court cliché. It’s all true, but to make it felt? The art of poetry is making the obvious become lovely and new again, coaxing it into memorable speech. Robert Hass’s poems, especially in his long-awaited fifth collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005, can have just that effect.

“Art and Life,” for instance, an extended riff on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk, explores art, restoration, light, paint, and rebirth—almost in one long, miraculous breath. Hass, who teaches at UC Berkeley, resists the quick quote or easy quip: the wonder of this remarkable poem is how it quietly circles round and round back into itself over three-plus pages.

What’s rarer still is the quiet moral authority that speaks through the new poems, the assuredness of a voice that can take on the horrors of war and the huckleberries of Inverness in the same measured way, without hysteria or hyperbole. Each poem resists the obvious showstopper line, instead incorporating slow effects that build momentum over the whole collection, measuring our actions and choices against a backdrop of silence and death. Hass has always attempted to link the historical moment with the intimate, but here the fusion is close to perfect. The voice that speaks through these poems is wiser, more seasoned, more certain of itself and its terrain.

These poems extend Hass’s lifelong meditation on loss, on memory, on grief and wonder, on the various glitches “through which chance / And terror enter on the world,” as he says in one of the poems, and, increasingly, on what he has called our moral responsibility to history. In a sense, such musings began with a personal vision in Hass’s landmark early poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” with its near epigrammatic opening lines—“All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking”—and gradually embraced the world. In Hass’s relaxed, Californian, thinking-out-loud voice, the poems usually sound like an extended discussion with himself. A voice this unstrident can tackle subject matter that would, in less skilled hands, simply be heavy-handed and tendentious.

Take “Ezra Pound’s Proposition,” which begins by noting Pound’s contention that, in Hass’s words, “Beauty is sexual, and sexuality / Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility / Of the earth is economics.” In 22 lines that are already surfacing on blogs and websites, the World Bank arranges the funds for a dam that floods 300 villages, sending displaced villagers into Bangkok, where their daughters turn to prostitution. The epi­phanic connection sparks like lightning between Pound’s aesthetics, the Thai dam, and the teenage prostitute who confronts the poet and says, “in plausible English, / ‘How about a party, big guy?’”.

Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941;

Cynthia Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and writes regularly for other publications. Her book Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations was published last year by University Press of Mississippi.