The Way It Is

The Way It Is
by William Stafford

The Way It Is
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Book Summary Information

Author: William Stafford
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-04-15
ISBN: 1555972845
Number of pages: 268
Publisher: Graywolf Press

Book Reviews of The Way It Is

Book Review: William Stafford: Crossing Time & Distance
Summary: 5 Stars

"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 alive
that 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.

Summary of The Way It Is

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.

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

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