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"[His] poems . . . bear witness to both the care and disregard around us--naming the places, catching the shine of the ordinary, pulling the rug out from under vanity and pretension, giving fresh credit to the selfless and decent, acknowledging the inevitable, nudging us toward observant lives and peaceful interactions."--Jurors, Western Book Awards Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, 1992
The late William Stafford's poetry and essays have had a major influence on contemporary American poetry. Since his book Traveling Through the Dark won the National Book Award in 1963, his awards have grown exponentially as new work has appeared. The range of writers in the past four decades who have celebrated Stafford's work-- from Margaret Atwood to James Dickey-- is remarkable. On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things helps clarify the precise nature of Stafford's influence by assembling the responses of some of our best poets and critics to his work, including Richard Hugo, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Robert Coles, Linda Pastan, and Robert Creeley. This collection offers a unique view of Stafford's sometimes controversial work and insight into several of the liveliest recent debates in poetics.
Tom Andrews is Assistant Professor of English, Ohio University.
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Animates the seasons as winter drinks up summer's green sounds and silences them with a cold blanket of white until springtime returns. ... Read more

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"It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow."
--William Stafford
A plain-spoken but eminently effective poet, the late William Stafford (1914-1993) has managed to shape part of the mainstream of American poetry by distancing himself from its trends and politics. Though his work has always inspired controversy, he was widely admired by students and poetry lovers as well as his own peers. His fascination with the process of writing joined with his love of the land and his faith in the teaching power of nature to produce a unique poetic voice in the last third of the twentieth century.
Crossing Unmarked Snow continues--in the tradition of Stafford's well-loved collections Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life-- collecting prose and poetry on the writer's profession. The book includes reviews and reflections on poets from Theodore Roethke to Carolyn Forche, from May Sarton to Philip Levine; conversations on the making of poems; and a selection of Stafford's own poetry. The book also includes a section on the art of teaching, featuring interviews, writing exercises, and essays on the writer's vocation.
William Stafford authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose during his lifetime, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation and You Must Revise Your Life.
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Customer Reviews (1)

Wisdom from a master
Stafford was a great poet; he also writes about writing like a great teacher.I heartily endorse this book to anyone who has read "Writing the Austrialian Crawl."If you haven't read that book, read it first, and then read this one.This book is a posthumous collection of magazine articles, interviews, and other scattered writings.While it is delight to me, and anyone else who loved Stafford, it is not as effective at demonstrating Stafford's approach to writing. That said, Stafford's generosity and humanity shine in this collection.It is worth reading, even if you are not a writer. ... Read more

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The years of the first industrial revolution saw a remarkable flowering of radical social criticism in Britain. This is a study of the ideas that emerged then and of the social and intellectual conditions from which they developed. Dr Stafford begins in Part I by presenting what will be seen as a very valuable general account of the historical and cultural setting, showing how the language of social debate had been affected by intellectual developments and the increasingly rapid transformations of society. Then in Part II he discusses ten major critics of British society, from Thomas Spence to William Cobbett, who represent a wide range of political opinion from anarchism to Tory radicalism. Dr. Stafford takes a key text by each author, sets out its argument, and analyzes it both critically and historically, showing the particular influences that shaped it and revealing the ways in which the social thought of the time resembles or diverges from our own. This book will help to recover from unwarranted neglect this important tradition of writing that did much to form subsequent thinking about society. It will make a valuable contribution to the study of the literature and the social and intellectual history of the period. ... Read more

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John Stuart Mill was one of Britain's greatest philosophers and radical politicians whose views had a profound influence on thinking on liberty, social policy and gender relations. William Stafford's accessible new study outlines Mill's reputation from his lifetime to the present, together with a discussion of the major areas of his moral and political thought. During his lifetime Mills was scurrilously abused and threatened for his views on the British Empire, feminism and socialism. He was often disparaged as a confused and unoriginal thinker, but in his later years he maintained a national and international reputation which no subsequent British thinker has matched. Recent scholarship has vindicated his power, originality and continuing relevance, and rival ideologies have battled to claim him as a precursor. This book presents him as a consistent and engaged radical politician, defending democracy while thinking subtly about its problems, advocating a non-paternalistic, non-welfarist form of socialism, and placing women's issues on the agenda.
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