Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays Book

I discovered John Haines, via Google. Before I moved to Alaska. Indeed, before I had any idea of what it would mean to live in Alaska. The effect of this timing, I might venture, is that my perspective on living here has been influenced and heightened by his.

Almost a year after I had moved here, I had the chance to see John Haines reading his work. It was a small group. It was a thrilling reading. It would not surprise me if, when I am old and my entertainments are condensed down to a rocking chair on a log porch and a particularly vibrant rhubarb patch, I still say that meeting John Haines was one of the highlights and pinnacles in the search to build a good life. I consider treasure the books I bought that night - autographed by him and notationed by me during this short time that I've been living in his backyard.

He is best known as a poet. His poetry is hard - honest hard, but also hard to gain a familiarity with. I struggle with it. I struggle to understand it. I struggle to feel comfortable with it. And I love those struggles. I'm better for them. But it is, still, a struggle. His essays, however....oh, his essays are like.....that conversation into the late, late night that follow a genuine meal with real friends when the plates have been cleared, but the diners linger over dried fruit, nuts and another jam jar of wine, and the dogs are asleep under the table and the room glows with the red embers inside the wood stove. They provoke whilst simultaneously comforting. They challenge you to achieve your full capability. They ask you to look again at your every-day scenes, and really see them. Like a friend who has seen you through all your phases, his essays ask you to look again at what you come from, and where you are, and where you want to be, and what you want your world and influence to be. To look at critters, and skies, and what you eat, and what you read, and who you entrust with your honesty. Oh, this is all hyperbolistic. And I feel uncomfortable trying to describe such a great talent for writing and living with these gushing words. There is probably a faux pas in doing this, but I might venture that I see John Haines in much the same way that John Haines describes Robinson Jeffers:

He was rough-hewn in his way, homemade as so many Americans of genius are, putting together from odds and ends of the classics, from European culture and Eastern thought, combined with an indigenous American experience, some reasonably coherent attitutde with which to face a disintegrating world.