Edited by Kevin Bezner and Kevin Walzer. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1995. 242 pages.
The Wilderness of Vision is the first collection of criticism of the poetry of John Haines, who, despite many other adventures, will probably always be best known for the fact that he spent several years homesteading in a cabin in a remote part of Alaska and for the poetry that that experience generated. The editors of the volume, Kevin Bezner and Kevin Walzer, have compiled this collection of essays not just to demonstrate Haines's skill as a "nature poet," but to begin to establish his reputation as a major American poet. The Wilderness of Vision provides much evidence to justify that claim.
Although his primary theme is the relationship between humankind and nature, Haines is just as interested in art itself and what poetry does for the human endeavor. Other critics view his work in a variety of other contexts, all documenting the richness of his poetry and its evocative, otherworldly quality. So varied is his approach and his impact that one of the contributors (William Studebaker) identifies Haines as a mystic, a label which might puzzle the poet himself.
Most of the essayists attempt to place Haines in the tradition of the classic Modernists such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, poets for whom Haines reveals his fondness in an interview which begins the critical part of the volume. Another of his favorite artists is Paul Klee, about whom Haines wrote a poem, and whose paintings seem childlike at first glance but on further inspection reveal that they are informed by a complex intelligence which seeks to combine the freshness of innocent vision with the harsh wisdom of adult experience. In the same way, Haines's lyrics seem not only short but tiny until they begin to expand in the reader's consciousness. For example, in "Poem of the Forgotten," Haines takes the reader through the poet's consciousness, and in a few spare lines, wakens the reader to the vastness and terror of wilder- ness:
I came to this place,
a young man green and lonely.
well quit of the world,
I framed a house of moss and timber,
called it a home,
and sat in warm evenings
singing to myself as a man sings
when he knows there is
no one to hear.
I made my bed under the shadow
of leaves, and awoke
in the first snow of autumn,
filled with silence.
Haines is fully aware of not only the poetic tradition in which he works but also the whole tradition of western art. Many of his poems are about art itself or art objects, such as "Meditation on a Skull Carved in Crystal," which several of the critics view as central. That an artist would choose to use a very fragile medium as a means of creating a reminder of our own fragility and ultimate annihilation, says Don Bogen, makes the skull "a destroyer of human structures and a mirror of basic truths." Although Bogen is describing the skull, he could also be describing the effect of Haines's poetry. Haines constantly reminds his readers that human constructs are just that—constructs—and it is the reality which lies behind them that must be placed foremost. Maria Theresa Maggi, in her essay "Pilgrim at the Tomb: The Idea of the Museum in the Collected Poems of John Haines," notes that Haines likes to consider art not just as creation but as creation placed in a human, culturally determined context, and to suggest what that context means to our understanding of not just art, but ourselves and nature:
Our choice becomes not whether to live or die; both are a certainty . . . . The choke [sic] is in how we seek to be remembered by what we leave behind us, and in whether that choice seeks to honor or dominate the Earth and its cy-cles. For Haines, though, whether to honor or dominate isn't really a choice, and it is this irony that his idea of the museum most beautifully expresses.
Therefore Maggi points out that even Haines's poems on art lead the reader back to his primary subject, nature.
Several of the critics note that Haines's work also involves the evocation of something like a dream in its account of humankind meditating on nature. Just as actual dreams function as pathways between our limited, conscious world and deeper realms. Haines's poems combine palpable sensuous reality with surreal touches that suggest a reality beyond the phenomenal. One of Haines's poems describes his finding an abandoned shack in which there was an injured bird "that filled the room." That is, the pain and torment of the bird (one thinks of Jeffers's "Hurt Hawk" and "The Caged Eagle's Death Dream") so overwhelm the poet that his consciousness is filled with this experience and he kneels, "a man shown the face of God." Poetry, like dreams, helps humanity to form new myths to make experiential sense of the invisible.
The effect of John Haines's nature poetry, his critics point out, is not just to depict a scene but, through language and art, lead the reader to experience nature. Carolyn Allen writes, "These poems have at their center a structure, a tension, rather than a precise description." What the reader experiences is not nature but a nature changed and transformed by art, and here Haines has a point of intersection with Robinson Jeffers.
Although Haines writes short, sparse lines and only lyrics, no narratives, his view of our disastrous interaction with nature is one he shares with Jeffers. Several of the essayists (Dana Gioia, John R. Carpenter, Dennis Sampson) specifi-cally refer to Jeffers in their attempt to find a ground on which to meet Haines. Both poets apprehend nature less from the joyous perspective of John Muir or the restorative paradigm of Wordsworth or Thoreau than from the perspective of an enlightened person who stands apart from the masses, who regard the natural world as a commodity to be used. They see it as a miracle to be experienced, yet also sadly recognize their kinship with the rest of humanity and their role in the destruction of the natural world. For example, Haines's poem "In the Forest without Leaves" reveals a natural world replaced with a techno-natural world which mimics without spirit the qualities of the world it replaced:
forest of wires and twisted steel . . .
The seasons are of rust
and renewal,
or there are no seasons at all,
only shadows that lengthen
and grow small—
sunlight on the edge of a blade.
nothing that thrives but metal
feeding on itself—
cables for roots . . .

The contribution of both poets is to use their work to establish a new feeling for the non-human through their poetry. Sharon Klander points out that Haines is in the camp of Heidegger, who regarded the role of mind, language, and particularly art as not that of describing nature but defining it. Just as Jeffers makes Big Sur into something more understandable by calling it "This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places"—before that description it had been water and rocks, pasture and cattle—Haines changes our world by telling us in "Little Cosmic Dust Poem" that even emotion is composed of the stardust from which the universe was made:
Out of the cold and feeling dust
that is never and always
the silence and waste to come . . .
This arm, this hand,
my voice, your face, this love.

Don Bogen, who analyzes this poem at some length in his essay, which places Haines in the Romantic tradition, notes that "[The poem] shows how difficult Romantic claims have become for him. He is asking that final couplet to stand up against a great deal of darkness. . . ." That remark might have been made about many of Jeffers's lyrics as well.
The book is neatly organized, beginning with a chronology of Haines's life, which is followed by an interview with the poet conducted by Kevin Walzer. The major portion of The Wilderness of Vision is a series of critical essays, some commissioned specifically for this volume and therefore taking the poet's entire career and opus for their subject (such as those by Wendell Berry and Kevin Walzer), and some collected from an earlier period in the poet's career (such as those by Carolyn J. Allen and Donald Hall). This central portion also includes an essay by Sam Hamill on Haines's prose works. A section of reviews follows this group of critical essays, rounding out the volume so that almost everything of significance about John Haines is collected here, including some negative opinions, such as those offered in a review by Richard Tillinghast. The volume concludes with a useful bibliography of works by and about John Haines.
James Baird, a frequent contributor of conference papers and articles on Jeffers, is on the English faculty of the University of North Texas at Denton.

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