Placing John Haines

By James Perrin Warren

John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer--the interior of Alaska, and especially its boreal forest--marking his poetry and prose and helping him find his unique voice.

Placing John Haines, the first book-length study of his work, tells the story of those years, but also of his later, itinerant life, as his success as a writer led him to hold fellowships and teach at universities across the country. James Perrin Warren draws out the contradictions inherent in that biography--that this poet so indelibly associated with place, and authentic belonging, spent decades in motion--and also sets Haines's work in the context of contemporaries like Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and his close friend Wendell Berry. The resulting portrait shows us a poet who was regularly reinventing himself, and thereby generating creative tension that fueled his unforgettable work. A major study of a sadly neglected master, Placing John Haines puts his achievement in compelling context.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1602233098
• ISBN13: 9781602233096
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"