TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK

by William Stafford ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A second volume of verse which will repay the confidence West of Your City won. William Stafford is a poet of nature and of place and of people, a descendant of the school of Robinson and Frost as against the elegant, elliptical genre of Eliot or Pound. The poems collected here embrace the modern day American West, its landscape and its lyric, Oregon and Colorado, cottonwood trails and blizzards, station-wagons and drive-ins, a manner provincial not cosmopolitan, normal rather than neurotic. Yet he knows the sophistication of understatement (""I'd just as soon be pushed by events to where I belong""), the importance of belief (""The earth says have a place, be what that place requires"") and of vision (""Where finally the way the world feels/ really means how things are/ in dear detail/ by ideal light all around us""). A poignant, unpretentious, quietly perceptive voice, sometimes sadly reflective, sometimes wryly philosophical. It should attract both attention and admiration.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962

Categories: NONFICTION