Placing John Haines by James Perrin Warren (review)

James Perrin Warren goes a long way toward remedying the relative critical neglect of John Haines's work, making a convincing case for the importance of the prose as well as the poetry, which he regards as deserving comparison with that of such major ecopoets as Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry. His pioneering book-length study of Haines's career makes excellent use of the Haines papers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and of the scattered archives of many of the poets and editors with whom Haines corresponded to establish a rich context for understanding his evolution as a poet and essayist and his growing sense of the failings of contemporary society.

Warren devotes his initial chapter to showing how Haines found the voice that we hear in the spare, haunting poems of Winter News (1966), the book in the Wesleyan University Press poetry series that marked his emergence as a poet. He demonstrates the importance of Haines's discovery of classic Chinese poetry (in Rexroth's translations) and of his correspondence with Robert Bly and Donald Hall, who pushed him to prune and shape his verse to produce a manuscript that could be published in the Wesleyan series. We see how Haines, drawing on years of homesteading in Richardson, Alaska, developed the strong sense of place that informs his work. Warren proceeds chronologically for the most part, illustrating how each of Haines's books came together and interspersing analyses of the more significant essays and poems. This approach is especially productive in the case of the memoir based on Haines's years in Richardson, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989), the design for which emerged slowly as Haines published and revised short essays throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Warren identifies major themes and motifs that emerge early and recur in much of the subsequent work. He is attuned to Haines's attraction to archaic patterns of human experience (the hunt, the journey), emblematic of a primal relationship between humans and the natural world, and to a twilight world of dreams and shadows in which the boundary between past and present is erased. He focuses as well on the ways Haines becomes more than the most prominent Alaskan writer as he develops a public voice and a sense of the responsibility of the poet to expose what he sees as the destructive tendencies of his own time.

One of the strengths of Placing John Haines is Warren's documentation of Haines's extensive correspondence with other writers and their influence on him. He shows, for example, how correspondence with Hayden Carruth and Wendell Berry stretched over decades and how Berry in particular reinforced Haines's sense of the writer's role as critic of society. We learn about Haines's reliance on the advice of Scott Walker, his editor at Graywolf Press through much of his writing career, and important friendships with Dana Gioia and the composer John Luther Adams.

Warren argues that Haines produced his best work in the mature verse of the later poetic sequences from the 1980s and 1990s. Sequences on works of art, reflecting Haines's early training in painting and sculpture, offered a means of commenting on a turning away from nature (in paintings of Bosch, for example) and on the violence unleashed by American foreign policy (Goya). Warren shows how Haines continued to draw upon his Alaskan experience even as his interests were broadening after leaving Alaska and beginning a peripatetic life of visiting academic appointments. He invokes a phrase used by Haines, "changed pastoral," to describe the blending of nature and a disappearing culture of early settlers in harmony with it in such elegiac sequences as "Rain Country" and "In the Forest Without Leaves." As Warren shows, Haines's attraction to deep time and rhythms dictated by nature persists throughout his work and gives rise to many of his most suggestive images, including the one with which he...