Customer Reviews

Descent (Notable Voices)

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Now in his eighty-sixth year, Alaskan poet and essayist John Haines has issued "Descent," a judicious sampling of his critical and autobiographical prose taken from his published work of the last four decades. These distinguished, superbly crafted pieces cover Haines' youth, his experiences as a sailor during World War II, his days as a homesteader by the Richardson Highway outside Fairbanks, his deep concerns about the environment, his encounters with famous contemporaries such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and his critiques of American and world poetry.

In each of these essays, Haines demonstrates an elegant, thoughtful prose style and a stubborn refusal to kowtow to poetic fashion. He is and has always been his own man, praising only what he sees as genuine and rejecting what he finds precious, sloppy, or false. "Forgotten Virtues," his admiring portrait of his Richardson Highway neighbor Billy Melvin, tells us much about Haines himself. "He had gained no wealth, but had managed to keep his honesty and survive in a difficult time," Haines says of Melvin, and the same can be said for Haines himself. In "The Story of a Poem," Haines tells of the writing of perhaps his greatest poem, "A Poem Without Meaning," which occupied him on and off for 28 years. Some of the most bracing reading in the book comes from the series of "Poetry Chronicles" Haines wrote for "The Hudson Review." In these review-essays, Haines leaves us in no doubt that he despises the ivory-tower conception of a poet. Poetry, to be any good in Haines' view, must be engaged in the real world, which means among other things the political and social worlds. Here is what he has to say about two poets he particularly admires, the American Thomas McGrath and the Pole Adam Zagajewski: "With the example of McGrath and Zagajewski in mind, I would suggest once more our need for a poetry that can include political thought and the philosophy of political life. If poets cannot be teachers, they are merely entertainers and of passing importance."