Descent

This volume bears witness to John Haines's position as a true man of letters. The essays, reviews, chronicles, memoirs, and poems (spanning four decades) testify to the breadth and depth of his concerns. The life - rooted for decades in Alaska - and the writing are bound together inextricably...What interests Haines throughout the various modes represented in this volume is to clear away the numerous confusing, self-justifying and downright mendacious vapors that surround various human projects - be it drilling for oil or writing poems. He is a critic in the pure sense - a truth teller who has no use for relativism. Haines's voice is an intensely American voice in the sense that it insists we can be connected to the land in ways that may redeem and vivify us. It insists that the place of poetry is central not peripheral. This volume adds to the trove that Haines has bequeathed us.