Twenty poems

by John Meade Haines

32 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

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. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his recent works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993); and New Poems 1980-88 (1990), for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award.

He has also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989).

Haines spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska, and has taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honours include the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. John Haines lives in Helena, Montana.
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Reviews

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a chapbook of poems by Haines, one of the better poets who wrote about the outdoors, especially in the state of Alaska. I especially like his poems, and I'm reminded of "The Last Election" which he read at a poetry reading I attended many years ago, and he told me after the reading, when I expressed appreciation for that poem, that he didn't think there was any market for a poem like that one. Later I was pleased to note that it made the Best American Poetry series.