Synopses & Reviews
So, the world happens twice--once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.
William Stafford filled his life and ours with poetry of challenge and consolation. The Way It Is gathers unpublished poems from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's life in poetry.
The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings off into emptiness. What emerges here is Stafford's faith in language and the soul, those things that form the base for his artistic gyroscope. This collection reveals the depth and breadth of a poet for whom the art was to make a life richly lived.
Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, William Stafford was one of our most prolific and celebrated poets. He was a witness for peace, and for honesty, recognizing in his writing that "justice will take us millions of intricate moves." Author of over fifty books, and recipient of the National Book Award for Traveling through the Dark, Stafford was a professor at Lewis & Clark College, and a traveling teacher throughout the world. As a conscientious objector during World War II, he began his unswerving habit of writing before dawn each day, and his habitual generosity to other writers and readers. After serving as consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970, he was named Oregon's Poet Laureate in 1975. He died at his home in Oregon in 1993.
Review
"Stafford's quiet presence in the landscape of American poetry in my lifetime has been a kind of continuing reassurance whose values always seemed to me beyond question. Even those of us who have read him for years are almost certain to be surprised now, I think, and repeatedly surprised, at the range and freshness of his gift, its responsiveness to the small, the plain, the apparently usual. I think his work as a whole will go on surprising us, growing as we recognize it, bearing witness in plain language to the holiness of the heart's affections which he seemed never to doubt. [This book is] a treasure that he has left us."—
W.S. Merwin"[Stafford] left behind a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of [the twentieth] century . . . The poems, which reveal many of Stafford's themes—his affinity for Native Americans, love of nature, protest of war, and concern about the dangers of technology—are subtle and powerful in tone, but imagery is paramount . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal
"This is a collection to savor and admire. The many contributors to this extraordinary endeavor have completed a task worthy of this much-loved poet."—Harvard Review
Synopsis
So, the world happens twice--once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.
William Stafford filled his life and ours with poetry of challenge and consolation. The Way It Is gathers unpublished poems from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's life in poetry.
The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings off into emptiness. What emerges here is Stafford's faith in language and the soul, those things that form the base for his artistic gyroscope. This collection reveals the depth and breadth of a poet for whom the art was to make a life richly lived.
Synopsis
William Stafford is widely recognized as one of the most important poets of this century. The Way It Is gathers, for the first time, many of the unpublished poems from his last months, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as a generous selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly collaborated on shaping the monumental body of Stafford's lifetime work to ensure that the collection does justice to Stafford's prodigious range. What emerges is Stafford's faith in language and the soul, those things that form the base for his artistic gyroscope. This collection shows us the depth and breadth of a poet for whom the art was to make a life worth living
Synopsis
"William Stafford's quiet presence in the landscape of American poetry in my lifetime has been a kind of continuing reassurance whose value always seemed to me beyond question. Even those of us who have read him for years are almost certain to be surprised now, I think, and repeatedly surprised, at the range and freshness of his gift, its responsiveness to the small, the plain, the apparently usual. I think his work as a whole will go on surprising us, growing as we recognize it, bearing witness in plain language to the holiness of the heart's affections which he seemed never to doubt. A treasure that he has left us."
W.S. Merwin
Synopsis
William Stafford (1914-1993) was an earnest, perceptive, and often affecting American poet who filled his life and ours with poetry of challenge and consolation.
The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems gathers unpublished works from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential and wide-ranging selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, and the poet, translator, and author Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's pioneering career in modern poetry. The poems in
The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings-off into emptiness.
About the Author
Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914,
William Stafford was one of our most prolific and celebrated poets. He was a witness for peace, and for honesty, recognizing in his writing that "justice will take us millions of intricate moves." Author of over fifty books, and recipient of the National Book Award for
Traveling through the Dark, Stafford was a professor at Lewis & Clark College, and a traveling teacher throughout the world. As a conscientious objector during World War II, he began his unswerving habit of writing before dawn each day, and his habitual generosity to other writers and readers. After serving as consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970, he was named Oregon's Poet Laureate in 1975. He died at his home in Oregon in 1993.