Ebook: Placing John Haines

"John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer--the interior of Alaska, and especially its boreal forest--marking his poetry and prose and helping him find his unique voice. Placing John Haines, the first book-length study of his work, tells the story of those years, but also of his later, itinerant life, as his success as a writer led him to hold fellowships and teach at universities across the country. James Perrin Warren draws out the contradictions inherent in that biography--that this poet so indelibly associated with place, and authentic belonging, spent decades in motion--and also sets Haines's work in the context of contemporaries like Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and his close friend Wendell Berry. The resulting portrait shows us a poet who was regularly reinventing himself, and thereby generating creative tension that fueled his unforgettable work. A major study of a sadly neglected master, Placing John Haines puts his achievement in compelling context"--;Acknowledgments; Introduction: Placing John Haines; Part 1. Alaska; Chapter 1. Discovering Richardson: Place and Voice in Winter News (1966); Chapter 2. Inside America: A New Poetry of the Earth; Chapter 3. Shadow Language: Practicing the Art of Memory; Part 2. Another Country; Chapter 4. The Changed Pastoral: New Poems, 1980-88; Chapter 5. The Place of Conviction and the Public Voice; Chapter 6. Somebody There: A Career in Correspondence; Conclusion. John Haines's Place as Ecopoet; Bibliography; Notes; About the Author; Index.