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Overview
This remarkable collection showcases the full spectrum of the genius of John Haines. Through essays and letters, he reflects on the craft and value of poetry, the arts and their influence in public life, the creative spirit in art and literature, and wilderness and nature. Together, these pieces act as an homage and tribute to this singular force in literature.
Synopsis
John Haines is a master writer, as we have known for years. His negotiations with language, in both poetry and prose, have been brilliant. Now this book, in effect his collected essays, reveals more: a range of intelligence and affection such that I cannot imagine any reader being unmoved by them. It is a great and splendid book.
Hayden Carruth
Publishers Weekly
Many of the selections in this collection by award-winning poet Haines (The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer) are informed critiques of work produced by other poets, such as Robinson Jeffers, Carolyn Forch and John Ashbery, that will be of the greatest interest to serious readers of poetry. Haines also discusses the value of poetry as a vehicle for social commentary. Other evocative pieces of more general interest reflect on the author's love of the Alaskan wilderness, where he currently lives. Haines describes the pleasure of berry picking with his wife, and an early experience watching a moose die after being shot. (Haines has not hunted in 25 years.) He mourns the continued encroachment on the natural world by developers. An article in which he reviews books written about Alaska argues that author John McPhee (Coming Into the Country) delivers entertaining rather than insightful prose because he is a visitor to, rather than an inhabitant of, the place he is writing about. (Feb.)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"John Haines is a master writer, as we have known for years. His negotiations with language, in both poetry and prose, have been brilliant. Now this book, in effect his collected essays, reveals more: a range of intelligence and affection such that I cannot imagine any reader being unmoved by them. It is a great and splendid book."—Hayden Carruth"Haines writes like someone who has seen a part of the face of God, and who forever after remains both at peace and somewhat stunned.... To read Haines is to enter a clearing in the woods, to feel calmed, and that one was once here, centuries ago."—Barry Lopez
"If Alaska had not existed, Haines might well have invented it, so much do the observed elements of landscape correspond to a harshly powerful inner mythology. The terrifying fragility of consciousness as it confronts the bare and incommunicable presence of the physical world generates, early and late, a sense of uncanniness and awe, which Haines at his most characteristic transmutes into images of glacial terrain."—New York Newsday
"John Haines's spare, oracular lyrics feel as if they have come from a great distance. It behooves us to listen to a poet who deepens the silence around us and touches upon an ancient environmental wisdom ... splendidly odd, somberly beautiful."—Edward Hirsch, The New York Times Book Review