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  • "A Voice at Once Contemporary and Ancient":The Enduring Value of John Haines's Winter News
  • Marc Hudson (bio)

It has been more than forty years since Winter News, a slender first book by the Alaskan poet John Haines, was published by Wesleyan University Press. It was February 1966: early that month Lyndon Johnson had made his decision to "stand" in Vietnam and brought to an end a protracted pause in bombing. While the East Coast was digging out from a "Belial of blizzards," Johnson flew off to Honolulu to meet in strategic conference with politicians and generals from the U.S. and South Vietnam—Ky, Thieu, McNamara, Rusk, and many others. Shortly thereafter the bombing of North Vietnam resumed, and vast military operations—including Operation White Wing—commenced in the south. The war, which had been idling along, lurched into high gear. Johnson ominously warned the American people that "neither victory nor nation building" would be achieved quickly.

In his book Haines quietly announces himself opposed to such imperial enterprises. The book bears on its cover the image of a line of boot tracks in crusted snow; a line of smaller tracks—those of a snowshoe hare?—intersect the human tracks in the middle ground of the image. Beyond, a ridge line falls away in an ice fog to reveal a dim snowy landscape below. The image suggests a hunter bound away from the viewer into the icy fastness. Between the covers are some forty short poems evoking the wintry world of Alaska and a range of feelings congruent with that remote landscape. This was a poet at an even greater remove from contemporary culture than Robinson Jeffers had been half a century earlier. The narrator says that he is "well quit of the world" ("Poem of the Forgotten"). In only a few places does the poet voice his scorn for the world of politics and war. In "The End of Summer," he writes, "We will not storm what barricades / they erect on the Cuban beaches." And in "Christmas, 1962," he notes, "A soft wind [End Page 577] blows / across the islands of anger / and sadness." Haines has largely turned his back on the world.

The book's first reviews were mixed. Perhaps it was predictable that the mandarin Anthony Hecht, in the pages of the Hudson Review, wrote a largely negative review. He linked Haines with a group of American landscape poets (Robert Bly and James Wright, I would suspect) "whose work sometimes suffers from these same flaws"—that is, observations that are "flat in their obviousness" and sentimentality. The anonymous reviewer in the Virginia Quarterly Review was much more positive: "his poems have a true visionary quality." Richard Tillinghast, writing in Poetry later that year, identified Haines as "a follower of Robert Bly," and judged that his poems "have the faults of the poems published in The Sixties and kayak." But he soon shifted to a more positive tone and concluded with a glowing comparison to Robert Frost: "In both men, there is a kind of trouble that does not call attention to itself, the real thing."

In general the book received little fanfare—at best a measured approbation, some sense of promise to be realized. But it would find a readership that only a few poetry books do. It went through several printings in the sixties and seventies and was published in a second edition in 1982. The generation coming of age in the late sixties, those college students who would soon become embittered by the Vietnam War and who would seek alternative styles of life, were drawn to Winter News. I remember my first encounter with the book in the fall of 1969; a peace-activist friend who had gone camping in the interior of Alaska had picked up a copy in Fairbanks and brought it back with him to Washington, D.C. He read me a few poems out loud, and I was immediately taken by the quiet depth of the work. A few years later, in a Seattle bookshop, I purchased my own copy and read it all the way through for the first time. I felt, even more keenly, the book's...

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