What we remember about a lyric poet is an extremely small fraction of the total work; time, aided by editors, creates a reputation out of about five great poems. In the case of William Stafford, The Way It Is has considerably expanded the field of candidates. His widely anthologized "Ceremony," "Thinking for Berky," and "Traveling through the Dark" are here, along with other contenders, including "Adults Only," which begins, "Animals own a fur world; / people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly bare." A writer of silence, loss, memory, and conviction, Stafford wrote a poem almost every morning, rising at four to eat toast and compose. This is a part of his myth that the Stafford industry--other poets, workshop leaders, old friends--agrees is admirable, the hard-working farmhand who beats the cows to the dairy barn. Stafford's poem-a-day habit certainly made things difficult for his literary executors Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly. Nonetheless, The Way It Is manages to encompass a pleasingly varied survey of Stafford's 35- book career, from his first collection, West of Your City, published in 1960, to the lyric written on the morning of his death on August 28, 1993. Not every poem is as perfect as "The Farm on the Great Plains"; some of them are embarrassingly sentimental, and the editors have curiously omitted a number of Stafford's better and more complicated poems in favor of more recent unpublished ones that he presumably didn't have time to revise. But all Stafford poems are worth reading at least once, and in the absence of a many-volumed Collected Poems, The Way It Is is a useful compromise, making available poems from his moral, religious, secular, maverick, political, and apolitical modes--all of them wise and at once exquisitely rhetorical and deeply imagistic. --Edward Skoog


From Publishers Weekly
In a career that began at 46, Stafford (1914-1993) published 67 full-length collections and chapbooks of sharply observed verse, harvesting poems from his diligently carried out "Daily Writings." Rather than completely refining out the rougher work, this second attempt at selecting from Stafford's vast oeuvre quadruples the poem count of its predecessor, following the arc of a journeyman's career with its attendant excesses, successes and failures. Stafford, who after some itinerant years settled into a 30 year stay at Oregon's Lewis & Clark college and a stint as the state's poet laureate, rendered the objects that came his way in ordinary language. Most striking, in hindsight, is the easy range of his intentionally limited set of linguistic pipes: from simmering violence and its attendant atmospherics ("Travelling Through the Dark"; "Not in the Headlines") to religious naturalism ("I crossed the Sierras in my old Dodge/ letting the speedometer measure God's kindness,/ and slept in the wilderness on the hard ground.") to elegy ("At the Grave of My Brother") and social history and commentary ("Is This Feeling about the West Real?"; "Our City is Guarded by Automatic Rockets"). Other poems offer delicate philosophical introspection, as in the familiar "Bi-focal": "So, the world happens twice?/ once what we see it as;/ second it legends itself/ deep, the way it is." Including 71 previously unpublished new poems, among them the poem Stafford wrote the day he died, this collection fully reacquaints us with a quiet, generous presence on the American poetic landscape. (Apr.) FYI: Down in My Heart, Stafford's WWII conscientious objector's diary, is due from Oregon State in April ($14.95 paper 120p ISBN 0-87071-430-9). The Univ. of Mich. recently publishe the essay collection Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Winter's Vocation ($13.95 paper ISBN 0-472-06664-1; $39.50 Cloth Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A National Book Award winner in 1963, Stafford was also poet laureate of Oregon, and throughout his work he celebrated the beauty of nature while admonishing us to pause and enjoy it. This compendium celebrates the 35-book career of a lyric poet par excellence who died in 1993.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Independent Publisher
William Stafford, who died at age 79 in 1993, rose daily before dawn and wrote. Responsive "to the small, the plain, the apparently unusual," nothing was innately too slight for a poem's attention. He answered letters, sent poems to those who asked for them and, as Naomi Shihad Nye catalogues in her "Preface" to The Way It Is, the vigorous and engaged Stafford "...befriended the earth and its citizens most generously and attentively, at the same time remaining solitary in his countenance, intact, composed, mysterious, complete in his humble service." Graywolf Press's carefully compiled, well-made and intelligently edited "new and selected" brings together some 400 of Stafford's poems, work gathered from 67 books published between 1960 and 1996, as well as from journals and the poet's Daily Writings. Not unexpectedly, a wondering and complex man emerges in these often beguilingly direct poems. Stafford's notable ear and accessibly conversational voice produced poems resonant with an authentic language of the North American West. Native American fragments and placenames frequent his poetry His idioms resound with a west-of-the-Mississippi spaciousness There's a reliably spare and physical rhetoric keenly aware of history and skeptical of its verdicts ("'Dull Knife,' that sound, his name, surrounded/what the wind recovered when it came back/searching over the grass. The bodies had/disappeared..." from "One Man," p. 163), and he's unashamed of those yearning nostalgic reveries, the warm spots of memory that too many academic poets shun. For example, "School Days," set in 1934, concludes: At a tiny desk inside my desk, a doll/bends over a book. In the book is a feather/ found at the beach, from a dead gull./While Miss Leonard reads 'The Highwayman,'/I bend over my book and cry,/and fly all alone through the night/toward being the person I am. For those unfamiliar with Stafford's poetry, The Way It Is provides an expansive opening. For dedicated Stafford readers it coherently selects from his many books while placing special emphasis on assembled and unassembled poems written toward the end of his productive and influential literary life.


Review
"Stafford's quiet presence in the landscape of American poetry in my lifetime has been a kind of continuing reassurance whose values always seemed to me beyond question. Even those of us who have read him for years are almost certain to be surprised now, I think, and repeatedly surprised, at the range and freshness of his gift, its responsiveness to the small, the plain, the apparently usual. I think his work as a whole will go on surprising us, growing as we recognize it, bearing witness in plain language to the holiness of the heart's affections which he seemed never to doubt. [This book is] a treasure that he has left us."—W.S. Merwin

"[Stafford] left behind a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of [the twentieth] century . . . The poems, which reveal many of Stafford's themes—his affinity for Native Americans, love of nature, protest of war, and concern about the dangers of technology—are subtle and powerful in tone, but imagery is paramount . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"This is a collection to savor and admire. The many contributors to this extraordinary endeavor have completed a task worthy of this much-loved poet."—Harvard Review



Review
"Stafford's quiet presence in the landscape of American poetry in my lifetime has been a kind of continuing reassurance whose values always seemed to me beyond question. Even those of us who have read him for years are almost certain to be surprised now, I think, and repeatedly surprised, at the range and freshness of his gift, its responsiveness to the small, the plain, the apparently usual. I think his work as a whole will go on surprising us, growing as we recognize it, bearing witness in plain language to the holiness of the heart's affections which he seemed never to doubt. [This book is] a treasure that he has left us."—W.S. Merwin

"[Stafford] left behind a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of [the twentieth] century . . . The poems, which reveal many of Stafford's themes—his affinity for Native Americans, love of nature, protest of war, and concern about the dangers of technology—are subtle and powerful in tone, but imagery is paramount . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal

"This is a collection to savor and admire. The many contributors to this extraordinary endeavor have completed a task worthy of this much-loved poet."—Harvard Review



Book Description
William Stafford (1914-1993) was an earnest, perceptive, and often affecting American poet who filled his life and ours with poetry of challenge and consolation. The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems gathers unpublished works from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential and wide-ranging selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, and the poet, translator, and author Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's pioneering career in modern poetry. The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings-off into emptiness.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

William Stafford filled his life and ours with poetry of challenge and consolation. The Way It Is gathers unpublished poems from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's life in poetry. The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings off into emptiness.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In a career that began at 46, Stafford (1914-1993) published 67 full-length collections and chapbooks of sharply observed verse, harvesting poems from his diligently carried out "Daily Writings." Rather than completely refining out the rougher work, this second attempt at selecting from Stafford's vast oeuvre quadruples the poem count of its predecessor, following the arc of a journeyman's career with its attendant excesses, successes and failures. Stafford, who after some itinerant years settled into a 30 year stay at Oregon's Lewis & Clark college and a stint as the state's poet laureate, rendered the objects that came his way in ordinary language. Most striking, in hindsight, is the easy range of his intentionally limited set of linguistic pipes: from simmering violence and its attendant atmospherics ("Travelling Through the Dark"; "Not in the Headlines") to religious naturalism ("I crossed the Sierras in my old Dodge/ letting the speedometer measure God's kindness,/ and slept in the wilderness on the hard ground.") to elegy ("At the Grave of My Brother") and social history and commentary ("Is This Feeling about the West Real?"; "Our City is Guarded by Automatic Rockets"). Other poems offer delicate philosophical introspection, as in the familiar "Bi-focal": "So, the world happens twice/ once what we see it as;/ second it legends itself/ deep, the way it is." Including 71 previously unpublished new poems, among them the poem Stafford wrote the day he died, this collection fully reacquaints us with a quiet, generous presence on the American poetic landscape. (Apr.) FYI: Down in My Heart, Stafford's WWII conscientious objector's diary, is due from Oregon State in April ($14.95 paper 120p ISBN 0-87071-430-9). The Univ. of Mich. recently publishe the essay collection Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Winter's Vocation ($13.95 paper ISBN 0-472-06664-1; $39.50 Cloth -09664-8).

Library Journal

A National Book Award winner in 1963, Stafford was also poet laureate of Oregon, and throughout his work he celebrated the beauty of nature while admonishing us to pause and enjoy it. This compendium celebrates the 35-book career of a lyric poet par excellence who died in 1993.

Library Journal

Stafford, a National Book Award winner and once Oregon's Poet Laureate, left behind a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of this century. This volume compiles a wide range of his work, from "Traveling Through the Dark" to the poem he wrote on the day he died, "Are You Mr. William Stafford?" The poems, which reveal many of Stafford's themeshis affinity for Native Americans, love of nature, protest of war, and concern about the dangers of technologyare subtle and powerful in tone, but imagery is paramount. "Frogs discovered their national anthem again./ I didn't know a ditch could hold so much joy" notes one poem, regretting that the world is too fast-paced to notice beauty's intricacy. But Stafford stops to acknowledge his world and all its detail; up to the end, his dedication to language and rhythm revealed his heart's affections. Now this volume generously shares them. Highly recommended for all collections.Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, PA

Minnesota Monthly