Amazon.com Review
In "South Wind," describing a dream of horses, John Haines writes: "The thunder of their passage / broke down the walls of my dream. / I awoke in the ruined kingdom / of frost with a warm wind / blowing my hair, and hard about me / and in the distance / the heavy hoofs still pounding ..." Notice how, even in this brief excerpt, Haines marries opposites together in an unsettling way: the heavy inaction of sleep is infused with thunderous commotion, the horses represent both threat and beauty, waking does not chase away the dream, and the positive imagery of a warm wind becomes a "ruined kingdom / of frost." It's not for nothing that the New York Times Book Review called Haines's writing "splendidly odd." The passage is representative in terms of content as well as style. Haines, a longtime resident of Alaska, frequently writes about the environment and the elements. This collection uncovers 30 years of good work, from 1966 to 1996.
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From Publishers Weekly
This collection gathers work from eight previous books by Haines ( Uncollected and New Poems ), a remarkable and idiosyncratic poet. Although the landscape of Alaska, where he was a homesteader for 20 years, is always present in his poetry, Haines is not a "nature" poet in the usual sense. His treatment of the natural is more expressionistic than narrative, more metaphysical than pragmatic: "As I walked there," he writes in "The Turning," "I heard / the tall sun burning its dead; / I turned and saw behind me / a charred companion, / my shed life." His meditations are less reflections on nature than negotiations with it, as in the early poem "The Mole," in which he identifies with a creature who "lives unnoticed," who dreams of breaking the surface, "and a small, brown-furred / figure stands there, / blinking at the sky, / as the rising sun slowly dries / his strange, unruly wings." Haines's metaphors are striking, and seem to come from dreams. In "The Insects" he writes of "the carrion beetle awakening / in a tunnel of drying flesh / like a miner surprised by the sun" and of "maggots, wrinkled white men / building a temple of slime." The theme of human destruction of the environment and thoughtless materialism is often more explicit than this; but Haines's visionary witnessing is more moving than his overtly moral or political poems.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
