Of Your Passage, O Summer (2004) by John Haines

“Dear Rick Ardinger: In publishing John Haines’ Of Your Passage, O Summer, you have performed a very great service to the whole world of art and literature. His poems are beyond beautiful; they are important, uniquely valuable, and a destination for the hopes and ambitions of us all.” — Hayden Carruth, Unsolicited Letter, November 24, 2004

Of Your Passage, O Summer is a collection of poems from the late-1950s and early-1960s thought lost for decades, then found and published by Limberlost in honor of the poet’s 80th year in 2004. John Haines (1924-2011), the poet laureate of Alaska, homesteaded in the wilderness 68 miles outside Fairbanks, working and living off the land, and perhaps always most noted for his first collection of poems Winter News in 1966. Written in relative isolation, the poems in Of Your Passage, O Summer reflect news of the time—the Cuban missile crisis, confrontation with the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the early stages of the Vietnam War.

Influenced by his readings of classical Chinese poets, Haines’ poems in this unique chapbook quietly confront great questions about the very nature of existence, a plea for survival from a solitary survivor on a vast, beautiful, lonely, and formidable landscape. Haines dedicates the book “to the time, the place, and the life lived—that which gave me the poems—and now to the reader of them.”