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.

John Haines, poet, essayist, and teacher was born in 1924 and died in March 2011. After studying painting, he spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer and New Poems 1980-88, for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, University of Montana, Bucknell University, and the University of Cincinnati. He was Resident at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy and Rasmuson Fellow at the U.S. Artists Meeting, Los Angeles. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. In 2008, Sewanee Review awarded Haines the Atkin Taylor Award for Poetry. CavanKerry had the honor of publishing Descent in 2010, as well as A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, a collection of reflections on Haines’s writing.

The various essays and reviews collected here represent what may be a closing period in my life as a writer, as poet and critic. As has been the case since I began writing in my early twenties, Alaska, the land and its history, its people and culture, continues to be a main focus in my writing. And there is al- ways that other element in the background: our human history on this planet Earth, the harm we have done and continue to do as witnessed in Mythology, the Art and Literature we have left behind us. My paper on the Gilgamesh story bears witness to this in a very personal way, as do my thoughts on writing, on our current social and political climate, represented perhaps most intensely in my late Wartime memoir, the story of my US Navy service in WW II, an experience that has served as a les- son in my thinking, and remained a potential material for my writing.
—John Haines

Over the past half century John Haines has become as a powerful independent voice in American poetry. An outsider to both academia and bohemia, surviving at a subsistence level on the margins of society, Haines has achieved a startling and often disturbing clarity about contemporary life and literature. He has brought existential passion back to poetry criticism, a field now so often permeated by languid politesse and pedantry. In equal measures brilliant, original, disruptive, and irascible, Haines is one of the major poet-critics of the age.
— Dana Gioia

Few poets in this country write with such abiding excellence and clarity of spirit as John Haines. His gifts, whether poetry or prose, constitute some of the best that American letters have to offer. In Descent, he writes about poetry, World War II and his many homestead years in the harsh Alaska wilderness. A rich, memorable volume, engaging and always rewarding in its revelations, it is a most welcome addition to the already long and lasting legacy of one of our nation’s true literary treasures.
— Robert Hedin

John Haines’ title essay advocates descent into the land and the corresponding rise or flight of the free imagination. The memoirs, reviews and meditations that follow develop these themes-a literary consciousness embedded in environmental awareness, the binary of descent and flight fulfilled by an eloquent and devoted man. John Haines refreshes our literature with his gentle urgency, his readings of great, often neglected writers and his unwillingness to utter cant. Important writing by a major American poet and essayist, this book is not to be missed.
— David Mason

February 2010
212 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$24
978-1-933880-18-1