Passwords: Poems

by William Stafford

Poems deal with memories, language, nature, emotions, travel, work, and mortality

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He and his writings are sometimes identified with the Pacific Northwest.

In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon; his tenure in the position lasted until 1990. In 1980, he retired from Lewis & Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.


Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Reviews

[Cynthia Hart]

The Trouble with Reading

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning hast to find an author again.
But when we read, it’s just print -deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.

So sometime, let’s discover how the ink
feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
page after page. But maybe it is better not
to know; ignorance, that white country, rewards you just to accept it. You plunge; it holds you. And you have become a rich darkness.

[Kasandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd collection to try to categorize or state anything about as a whole, broken as it already is into 5 sections, only one of which I found consistently good (Section 4, Elegies). I liked a number of these, their imagery and feeling. But for every one I really, really liked, there were 2 or 3 that left me flat and bored. These are subtle poems. There's not a lot of music here, but there is a tender sense of humor and a plain way of speech that sometimes works and is softly touching. In general, many of these poems contain wonderful images, but those images are surrounded by timid or lazy language, so that many pieces don't seem finished or completely whole on their own. This is a book that likely could not get published now, is how it reads, somewhat dated. But the good ones are good enough for it to be kept, had I bought it and not checked it out of the library.

[Nicole West Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like this guy's poetry.
It's easy to understand and so very touching