During the recent cold weather, whenever I managed to drive anywhere through the snow I was accompanied by a deep, rolling, slightly guttural voice, with an accent you’d have found hard to place. West Country? Irish? North-Eastern?

John Haines: quietly intense eco-poet

Actually the accent was Alaskan, and the voice was that of John Haines, former Poet Laureate of Alaska, on a CD someone sent me from the US. I found Haines’s poems riveting, with their dreamlike, slightly surreal images, their subtle rhythms, and their intense focus on the natural environment. Haines, born in 1924, arrived in Alaska as a young man at a time when the government would give you a piece of land if you were prepared to live there.  He built himself a house out of wood and lived as a fur trapper, hunting elk and bear and gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the landscape and ecosystem. He also wrote poems.

Haines uses a short-lined free verse that asks you to consider carefully each image. The poems build, stage by quiet stage, and much of their quality comes from a combination of the stark beauty of their images with the unanswerable finality of the propositions they offer:

The door is open

and the shaggy frost-fog

bounds across the floor

and wraps itself about my feet…

…I feel

its breath deep in my bones.

 

A spirit in it wants

to draw me out past

the whitening hinges

into the cold, enormous rooms

where it lives.

 

Out there a flickering pathway

leads to a snowy grave

where something in me

has always wanted to lie…

Haines also has a remarkable sense of the very ancient history of the region’s peoples, particularly the ancestors of the Inuit and the Native Americans who came into the continent from Asia some forty thousand years ago:

Among the quiet people of the frost,

I remember an Eskimo

walking one evening

on the road to Fairbanks.

 

A lamp full of shadows burned

on the table before us;

and the light came as though from far off

through the yellow skin of a tent…

 

Thousands of years passed.

People were camped on the bank

of a river, drying fish

in the sun. Women bent over

stretched hides, scraping

in a kind of furry patience…

 

We were away for a long time.

The footsteps of a man walking alone

on the frozen road from Asia

crunched in the darkness

and were gone.

Besides his very fine Collected Poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Haines has written an autobiography, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, which is essentially a meditation on his many years in this austere, dangerous and immensely beautiful landscape.

Although a few years ago he was a candidate for the US Laureateship, he seems virtually unknown in the UK. The fine CD I was given seems unobtainable. But at least his books can be bought, and should be. His is an authentic voice, of great integrity,  less self-dramatising than Gary Snyder, more thoughtful and muted.  As a hunter (whatever one’s urban discomfort with killing) he had to learn to live not only close to animals but even as one of them: something that gives at times a shamanic quality to his poems. Here he tells how he lured a moose by making the noise of a rival moose rubbing its horns on a tree:

I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon…

In that poem, ‘Horns’, the moose survives. A companion poem (‘A Moose Calling’) is darker and sadder:

Who are you,

calling me in the dusk,

 

O dark shape

with heavy horns?

 

I am neither cow

nor bull -

 

I walk upright

and carry your death

in my hands…

Quietly and without fuss, perhaps disconcertingly so, John Haines is that recently much-trumpted thing: an eco-poet. We should be reading him. He’s made my life deeper and richer. I recommend him.