The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
by William Stafford
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A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet William Stafford, featuring unpublished works from his last year of life, including the poem he wrote the day he died, and providing selections drawn from throughout his career, from the 1960s through the 1990s.Tags
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Some really nice stuff, makes me wish for a comprehensive Collected Poems--he's got a lot of stuff, and it's all over the place, including signs on a nature trail. I find myself really liking him from his poems, a sensation I haven't felt since I read Jane Kenyon. Thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for introducing me to this poet--and several others. I used to stumble across new writers all the time when I was in college, it's really a treat to still be doing it in my sixth decade.
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78+ Works 2,054 Members
William Edgar Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas on January 17, 1914. He received a B.A. in 1937 and a master's degree in English in 1947 from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1954. During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector and worked in the civilian public service camps. He wrote about show more this experience in the prose memoir Down in My Heart, which was published in 1947. He taught at Lewis and Clark College from 1948 until his retirement in 1980. During his lifetime, he published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose including The Rescued Year, Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation, and An Oregon Message. He received several awards including a Shelley Memorial Award, a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, and the National Book Award in 1963 for Traveling Through the Dark. In 1970, he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position currently known as the Poet Laureate). He died on August 28, 1993. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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