Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems Book

Praise for John Haines

"A writer of rare vision and poetic eloquence."
--Robert Michael Pyle, New York Times Book Review

"Haines has always written with a beautiful ear. His early work distinguished itself by combining lucid images from the natural world with a dreamy inwardness. An imagination of solitude inhabited a solitary landscape; if the sensibility relished an ascetic purity, the body presented itself in the mouth's pleasure of vowel and in the eye's exactness. The later work ... retains these qualities-- sense and imagination-- while it adds more of the world and more of Haines' rigorous intelligence. He writes with a hard instrument on a hard surface, making no disposable verses."
--Donald Hall, The Nation

"His poems require concentration, rereading, and knowledge beyond what they impart, but the extra effort is richly, religiously rewarded."
--Ray Olson, Booklist

"If one views Haines' poetic development as a journey from the specific geography of the Alaskan wilderness to the uncharted places of the spirit, then that journey is now complete."
--Dana Gioia

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1924, John Haines studied at the National Art School, the American University, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art. He homesteaded in Alaska for over twenty years. He is the author of several major collections of poetry; a collection of reviews, essays, interviews, and autobiography, Living Off the Country (University of Michigan Press, 1981); and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (Graywolf Press, 1989). He has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for theArts Fellowship, the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and most recently a Western State Arts Federation Lifetime Achievement Award and a Lenore Marshall/The Nation poetry prize for New Poems 1980-1988 (Story Line Press, 1990). He is currently a freelance writer and teacher and still spends part of each year in Alaska.

Publishers Weekly

This collection gathers work from eight previous books by Haines ( Uncollected and New Poems ), a remarkable and idiosyncratic poet. Although the landscape of Alaska, where he was a homesteader for 20 years, is always present in his poetry, Haines is not a ``nature'' poet in the usual sense. His treatment of the natural is more expressionistic than narrative, more metaphysical than pragmatic: ``As I walked there,'' he writes in ``The Turning,'' ``I heard / the tall sun burning its dead; / I turned and saw behind me / a charred companion, / my shed life.'' His meditations are less reflections on nature than negotiations with it, as in the early poem ``The Mole,'' in which he identifies with a creature who ``lives unnoticed,'' who dreams of breaking the surface, ``and a small, brown-furred / figure stands there, / blinking at the sky, / as the rising sun slowly dries / his strange, unruly wings.'' Haines's metaphors are striking, and seem to come from dreams. In ``The Insects'' he writes of ``the carrion beetle awakening / in a tunnel of drying flesh / like a miner surprised by the sun'' and of ``maggots, wrinkled white men / building a temple of slime.'' The theme of human destruction of the environment and thoughtless materialism is often more explicit than this; but Haines's visionary witnessing is more moving than his overtly moral or political poems. (Sept.)