The Way It Is (Paperback)

by William Stafford (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
What we remember about a lyric poet is an extremely small fraction of the total work; time, aided by editors, creates a reputation out of about five great poems. In the case of William Stafford, The Way It Is has considerably expanded the field of candidates. His widely anthologized "Ceremony," "Thinking for Berky," and "Traveling through the Dark" are here, along with other contenders, including "Adults Only," which begins, "Animals own a fur world; / people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly bare." A writer of silence, loss, memory, and conviction, Stafford wrote a poem almost every morning, rising at four to eat toast and compose. This is a part of his myth that the Stafford industry--other poets, workshop leaders, old friends--agrees is admirable, the hard-working farmhand who beats the cows to the dairy barn. Stafford's poem-a-day habit certainly made things difficult for his literary executors Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly. Nonetheless, The Way It Is manages to encompass a pleasingly varied survey of Stafford's 35- book career, from his first collection, West of Your City, published in 1960, to the lyric written on the morning of his death on August 28, 1993. Not every poem is as perfect as "The Farm on the Great Plains"; some of them are embarrassingly sentimental, and the editors have curiously omitted a number of Stafford's better and more complicated poems in favor of more recent unpublished ones that he presumably didn't have time to revise. But all Stafford poems are worth reading at least once, and in the absence of a many-volumed Collected Poems, The Way It Is is a useful compromise, making available poems from his moral, religious, secular, maverick, political, and apolitical modes--all of them wise and at once exquisitely rhetorical and deeply imagistic. --Edward Skoog --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
In a career that began at 46, Stafford (1914-1993) published 67 full-length collections and chapbooks of sharply observed verse, harvesting poems from his diligently carried out "Daily Writings." Rather than completely refining out the rougher work, this second attempt at selecting from Stafford's vast oeuvre quadruples the poem count of its predecessor, following the arc of a journeyman's career with its attendant excesses, successes and failures. Stafford, who after some itinerant years settled into a 30 year stay at Oregon's Lewis & Clark college and a stint as the state's poet laureate, rendered the objects that came his way in ordinary language. Most striking, in hindsight, is the easy range of his intentionally limited set of linguistic pipes: from simmering violence and its attendant atmospherics ("Travelling Through the Dark"; "Not in the Headlines") to religious naturalism ("I crossed the Sierras in my old Dodge/ letting the speedometer measure God's kindness,/ and slept in the wilderness on the hard ground.") to elegy ("At the Grave of My Brother") and social history and commentary ("Is This Feeling about the West Real?"; "Our City is Guarded by Automatic Rockets"). Other poems offer delicate philosophical introspection, as in the familiar "Bi-focal": "So, the world happens twice?/ once what we see it as;/ second it legends itself/ deep, the way it is." Including 71 previously unpublished new poems, among them the poem Stafford wrote the day he died, this collection fully reacquaints us with a quiet, generous presence on the American poetic landscape. (Apr.) FYI: Down in My Heart, Stafford's WWII conscientious objector's diary, is due from Oregon State in April ($14.95 paper 120p ISBN 0-87071-430-9). The Univ. of Mich. recently publishe the essay collection Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Winter's Vocation ($13.95 paper ISBN 0-472-06664-1; $39.50 Cloth
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (April 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555972845
• ISBN-13: 978-1555972844
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #108,766 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stafford's Voice Makes You Listen, April 5, 2002

By	Brenda Miller (Bellingham, WA United States) - See all my reviews

When I read the poems of William Stafford, it feels less like reading and more like "listening." There's something about his voice that calls me to attention, that makes me notice not only the words on the page but all the sounds that attend my mornings: the return of the finches to the Hawthorne tree, for example, or the rustle of wind in the new cherry blossoms. As I re-read some of my favorite poems from The Way it Is, I find myself in a strange situation; I feel as though I have traded places with the poet, "partly propped up" on the sofa in his den at 4 a.m., where he wrote every day until he died in 1993. Perhaps it is because he often tells us so much about the writing process itself; Stafford's poems are imbued with that particular room; they arise from that private space he allows us to enter for a few moments at a time. He often brings in the same details over and over, the mundane yet transcendent things he notices in the early hours: sunlight moving across a wood floor, trees "still trying to arch as far as they could," the houses that "waited, white, blue, gray..." The things themselves, as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, become the containers of ideas, thought, emotion. The diction is simple, the rhythm a comfort; before we know it, we've been lured into a place of transcendence without even trying.
The sun becomes a constant companion to the writing act, a kind of muse that illuminates the hand at work. For instance, the last poem he wrote, just hours before he died, begins with the line: "Well, it was yesterday./Sunlight used to follow my hand." Towards the end, he reiterates: "I listened and put my hand/out in the sun again. It was all easy." Perhaps the knowledge that these are the last lines Stafford will write adds to their poignancy (that hand will soon be stilled, in darkness), but I feel privileged, every time I open this book, to be in the presence of a voice that speaks so simply and yet with such passion. Because of the sheer number of poems and writings Stafford left behind, there are bound to be some clunkers, some lines that seem overly simplistic and sentimental, but the force of Stafford's voice overcomes these occasional lapses. The Way it Is is a "must have" for the writer's library; crack open the book at the start of your own writing session and you'll remember why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and meditative., July 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

This latest and last living collection of William Stafford's work covers the past 20 odd years of his poetry as well as giving the reader some new, never before published work including the poem he wrote on the day that he died. This collection gives us an overview of Stafford's poetry that reveals him to be a man who is both interested and amused by the world around him. The book is divided into four sections, each of which is full of intelligent and meditative work reminiscent of the best of E.B. White's essays. While White was an essayist (not just a children's writer), and Stafford a poet, both men revel in unraveling the intricacies of the world using nothing more than the simple information provided to them in their daily lives. In "Stories From Kansas", Stafford simplifies the voracious egos of humankind into silly yet proud tufts of grass, "Little bunches of/grass pretend they are bushes/that will never bow./ They bow..." "The Way I! ! t Is" is reccomended reading for those who like a little zen with their humility or a little salt with their watermelon.

(excerpted from "Sic Vice & Verse" review by Carlye Archibeque.)

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars William Stafford: Crossing Time & Distance, June 17, 2004

By	Harmony C. Adkins (Northern California Sierra) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"You are a memory
too strong to leave this world..."

So wrote William Stafford in "For A Lost Child"
but it could apply equally as well to him.
His absence continues to leave a conspicuous void.
Still, there remains his writing, and this definitive volume
contains the majority of his finest work.

"Starting here, what do you want to remember?"

So opens "You Reading This, Be Ready"
and it's somewhat telling of what his writing was predominantly about:

Assuring remembrance. Making note of what endures.
The beauty. The sorrow. The questions.
Marking even the smallest snapshot scene as every bit as worthy of recall
as any grand-scale panorama.
Even as his own life and times become relegated to the past,
his poems ~ indeed, every insight he set on paper ~
forever will remain in the present tense ~
ever as accurate and timely as they were when first composed.
It's not only how things were, but how they are ~ the way it still is.

His based his work on common human experience,
the lessons and questions garnered in the day-to-day world.
Uncomplicated. Mindful. Authentic. Perceptive.
Life-affirming even as they question,
life-enhancing even when they convey a brutal truth.
Certainly no poet or writer should be without his presence on their nearest bookshelf.
His perceptions and voice reach across time and distance so vividly alive
that he easily incites a creative response ~
setting any aspiring writer fast upon his or her own path.
Serving as a literary generator, of sorts,
to paraphrase something Robert Frost once called those rare inspiring individuals.
He had a way of speaking to each reader so directly,
he made of them a friend.

You will never fail to notice every thread of light upon a leaf,
every solitary play of colour across the sunset sky,
every sad passenger in any passing car once you've shared his vision.
Rare was the moment, memory, thought or question,
he let go by without notice, contemplation, honourable mention.

"What can anyone give you greater than now...?"
he once asked and that thought still holds true.

And if you open this book completely at random, right here and now,
letting it fall open to any given page,
whatever line your eyes come to rest upon and read
will be pure gift: your life will be better for it.