The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

This collection of Stafford's poems represents a broad swath of his best work. The poems are at once intimate and personal and grand and universal. If you search for truth, Stafford leads down pathways that illuminate the darkness around.

"You are a memory too strong to leave this world..."So wrote William Stafford in "For A Lost Child" but it could apply equally as well to him. His absence continues to leave a conspicuous void. Still, there remains his writing, and this definitive volume contains the majority of his finest work. "Starting here, what do you want to remember?"So opens "You Reading This, Be Ready" and it's somewhat telling of what his writing was predominantly about: Assuring remembrance. Making note of what endures.The beauty. The sorrow. The questions. Marking even the smallest snapshot scene as every bit as worthy of recall as any grand-scale panorama.Even as his own life and times become relegated to the past,his poems ~ indeed, every insight he set on paper ~ forever will remain in the present tense ~ ever as accurate and timely as they were when first composed.It's not only how things were, but how they are ~ the way it still is. His based his work on common human experience,the lessons and questions garnered in the day-to-day world. Uncomplicated. Mindful. Authentic. Perceptive. Life-affirming even as they question, life-enhancing even when they convey a brutal truth. Certainly no poet or writer should be without his presence on their nearest bookshelf. His perceptions and voice reach across time and distance so vividly alivethat he easily incites a creative response ~ setting any aspiring writer fast upon his or her own path. Serving as a literary generator, of sorts, to paraphrase something Robert Frost once called those rare inspiring individuals. He had a way of speaking to each reader so directly, he made of them a friend. You will never fail to notice every thread of light upon a leaf,every solitary play of colour across the sunset sky, every sad passenger in any passing car once you've shared his vision.Rare was the moment, memory, thought or question,he let go by without notice, contemplation, honourable mention."What can anyone give you greater than now...?" he once asked and that thought still holds true.And if you open this book completely at random, right here and now, letting it fall open to any given page,whatever line your eyes come to rest upon and read will be pure gift: your life will be better for it.

When I read the poems of William Stafford, it feels less like reading and more like "listening." There's something about his voice that calls me to attention, that makes me notice not only the words on the page but all the sounds that attend my mornings: the return of the finches to the Hawthorne tree, for example, or the rustle of wind in the new cherry blossoms. As I re-read some of my favorite poems from The Way it Is, I find myself in a strange situation; I feel as though I have traded places with the poet, "partly propped up" on the sofa in his den at 4 a.m., where he wrote every day until he died in 1993. Perhaps it is because he often tells us so much about the writing process itself; Stafford's poems are imbued with that particular room; they arise from that private space he allows us to enter for a few moments at a time. He often brings in the same details over and over, the mundane yet transcendent things he notices in the early hours: sunlight moving across a wood floor, trees "still trying to arch as far as they could," the houses that "waited, white, blue, gray..." The things themselves, as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, become the containers of ideas, thought, emotion. The diction is simple, the rhythm a comfort; before we know it, we've been lured into a place of transcendence without even trying. The sun becomes a constant companion to the writing act, a kind of muse that illuminates the hand at work. For instance, the last poem he wrote, just hours before he died, begins with the line: "Well, it was yesterday./Sunlight used to follow my hand." Towards the end, he reiterates: "I listened and put my hand/out in the sun again. It was all easy." Perhaps the knowledge that these are the last lines Stafford will write adds to their poignancy (that hand will soon be stilled, in darkness), but I feel privileged, every time I open this book, to be in the presence of a voice that speaks so simply and yet with such passion. Because of the sheer number of poems and writings Stafford left behind, there are bound to be some clunkers, some lines that seem overly simplistic and sentimental, but the force of Stafford's voice overcomes these occasional lapses. The Way it Is is a "must have" for the writer's library; crack open the book at the start of your own writing session and you'll remember why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place.

This latest and last living collection of William Stafford's work covers the past 20 odd years of his poetry as well as giving the reader some new, never before published work including the poem he wrote on the day that he died. This collection gives us an overview of Stafford's poetry that reveals him to be a man who is both interested and amused by the world around him. The book is divided into four sections, each of which is full of intelligent and meditative work reminiscent of the best of E.B. White's essays. While White was an essayist (not just a children's writer), and Stafford a poet, both men revel in unraveling the intricacies of the world using nothing more than the simple information provided to them in their daily lives. In "Stories From Kansas", Stafford simplifies the voracious egos of humankind into silly yet proud tufts of grass, "Little bunches of/grass pretend they are bushes/that will never bow./ They bow..." "The Way I! ! t Is" is reccomended reading for those who like a little zen with their humility or a little salt with their watermelon.(excerpted from "Sic Vice & Verse" review by Carlye Archibeque.)