Customer Reviews

The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems

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John Haines ranks with Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Robinson Jeffers as one of the great solitaries of American literature. Whether he writes about hunting for moose near his Alaskan homestead or the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Haines remains true to his basic theme: that each of us is alone in the world, with only the examples presented by nature and art to guide us. If we are to survive, we must constantly use our minds and hearts to draw whatever wisdom we can from our experience, and make whatever accommodations we can to people and places beyond the narrow confines of our lives. He does not ask us to share his solitude so much as he tries to make us realize our own, and to help us find sustenance based on that knowledge. Haines' style--laconic, short-lined, plain but never easy--is among the most distinguished of any living poet. There are few contemporary poems, for example, as haunting as his "Rain Country": "All that we loved: a fire/ long dampened, the quenched/whispering down of faded/straw and yellowing leaves.//The names and the voices/within them, speak now/ for the slow rust of things/ that are muttered in sleep." The paperback edition of "The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer" contains more than twenty poems--mostly uncollected work from the 1960s--which do not appear in the hardcover version. This automatically makes it the better buy. John Haines has studiously avoided both the limelight and the tenure track, and thus has shunned the sort of lionization John Ashbery could not live without. But he is known and cherished by those readers who still believe that poetry can exhibit something akin to moral and intellectual force. It is, at the very least, an even trade.

I enjoyed this book of poetry because the poems are relatively short, easy to read (not loaded with complex imagery and metaphors) and comes from a unique perspective: a male outdoorsman. I recommend this book to those who haven't experienced John Haines and I would buy more from him again in the future.