Placing John Haines |
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| Author:
| Warren, James Perrin |
| ISBN: | 978-1-60223-309-6 |
| Publication Date: | Feb 2017 |
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press
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| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $34.95USD $37.95 |
Book Description:
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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. ...
More Description
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.