Although it was originally advertised as "The Apple Trees at Olema," Hass retitled the book Human Wishes just before it was typeset . . .

In the first section of Human Wishes, lines spill over at the right margin; they are not stopped, just as the subject matter, a profusion of incidents and images, runs on. In mostly one-,two-, and three-lined stanzas, Hass contours the prose line toward evocation instead of event, toward brilliant moments instead of narration . . .

Throughout the poems in section 1, Hass avoids writing from the perspective of an "I." His characters range from "a man" and "a woman" to "they," "we," and "you" . . .

The multiple pronouns parallel the multiple levels of diction, the juxtaposed rhythms, and the panoply of evoked moments, images, dialogue, and thought that are rapidly and abruptly revealed in the poems . . . the poems are often synchronic experiences, or realizations of the relatedness between disparate elements contained in the in the function of any moment, memory, or image. In this aspect, they are an applied poetics of new physics; they indicate morphic fields, the connections between all things visible and invisible . . .

While the poems in section 1 are marked by a syntax that is mildly refractory to sense, the prose poems of section 2 . . . retain all the transitions ordinary to spoken stories, but in highly phrased, cadenced lines, not dead blocks of prose. Some [poems] . . . seem to be made up of glances instead of long looks, as though to emphasize the marginal and quotidian at the expense of contemporary taste for the extreme in art, as though to make clear that a poem of details relevant to the movement of thought is as significant, perhaps more significant, than the poem of overt moral statement. These poems are documents of descriptions carried along by the sensuous pleasure of language. They are striking for their ironic oppositions.