Living Off the Country

When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence. In solitude, listening to his own voice, the events of his life reached into the past and the future.

We live on the surface, he discovered. It is the land that makes people. If a poet will see, will feel, will interpret his place and then relate that experience to what he knows of the world at large, he will have a life in imagination, a vitality beyond appearances.

John Haines is author of At the End of Summer: Poems 1948-1954; Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays; and The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer. He received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1991.