The long spaces which stretch ahead of us, compelling our half-willed entry into them; that curious Other, whose approach can be deadly, whose hiding-places and motivation are out in those long spaces and have to be sought for there—this is essential Stafford. If it takes some of its origin in Frost (much of our modern poetry of nature does, Emersonians to the contrary) there is also a great deal which was in Stafford from the beginning and was confirmed by Frost. Stafford saw the long spaces elementally in Kansas. What Stories That Could Be True makes clear is how the Midwest modes of living in space were transformed into the Northwest ones, how Stafford was plains and is mountains, how all these together shape out a vision which is unique in our time. It has now become possible to argue, with full substantiation, not only that Stafford is (or used to be) frequently uneven but also—what we have guessed for some time—that he is one of the best poets we have. The irony of that combination is also peculiarly his own.

One of the boons of this collected edition is its inclusion of West of Your City, Stafford's long unavailable first volume. Though some of the poems from that book had been reprinted in later collections this edition puts them back where they were, showing how they take their full meaning only in concentration and in their original place. Stafford's sense of westering is old and new, one that goes back through an American Romantic sense of the direction's meaning (Thoreau shows it beautifully) and is still part of the direction's force…. West is both Midwest and Far West but it is always west of where we are. It is the place of nature and especially of nature's secrecy, that Otherness which we can touch at times … and which privileged observers like Stafford's father can touch at any time…. What is out there is limitless in its secrecy but our need to go out there to find it is equally limitless…. West is a direction, a point of the compass, a way of organizing the long spaces which have been with Stafford from his first book to his latest; but West is also a state of being, a condition of the world in which we have to live. Stafford has always been surrounded by such conditions, some of which he can seek to penetrate, some of which (especially in the later books) he cannot hope to understand while we are here.

But there is still a good deal of understanding that is possible here, though we have to look for ways to get at it and for others who have done so. Stafford admires a certain intentness of being which he sees in animals but particularly in other men who seem grounded in that Otherness that he wants to know. Poems on Eskimos and Indians turn up, singly and in bunches, throughout the collected work. There is a series on Ishi which has mixed success, and there is a wonderful "Returned to Say," which puts the points as richly as Stafford has ever done. This is no sentimental primitivism, though the Cree in "Returned to Say" is as noble a savage as anyone has made, but rather an admiration of intentness of being because it seems to lead to—and grow back out of—a deep intentness of knowing…. [The] kind of seeing Stafford admires [is] a knowing of the world outside as though one were knowing it from inside itself, the kind of knowing that only people at the edge can have. Seeing and knowing are one, and saying follows from them: Stafford knows this, and so do the people at the edge. Intentness of being leads to intentness of knowing because we are as we see. We should be able, then, to use our probative seeing as a mode of search for the self…. Saying things at the edge is not only for those who know themselves and the world from which they speak; it is also for those who want to have such knowledge and put themselves at the edge in order to find it.

Being out there—or trying to be out there—means being in a place to which we have to pay careful attention. Of course the place can be anywhere because the edge one seeks to live at is as much a matter of the inner landscape as the outer; or, from another perspective, of the way these landscapes relate to each other…. If we are as we see we are also where we live. Stafford is a regionalist but he is as much a poet of the mind's places as of America's. In a way all regionalists are like that (Hardy's novels and poems make a similar point) but with Stafford that awareness of the coupling of place and being is a pervasive, possessive theme. He is as self-conscious about the coupling as Stevens is, though they come at it through very different modes. Stafford is sentimental about some things but never about this one. (pp. 17-18)

Critics ought to talk more about tonality in Stafford. There are ways of seeing and saying which are, for good and for bad, unmistakably his own: "If your policy is to be friends in the mountains / a rock falls on you: the only real friends—/ you can't help it." Sometimes this kind of kookiness brings out statements which we have to take on faith if we are to take them at all. Still, when we ease into them they tend to make the sort of sense that the anomalous can make when it opens up part of our lives. In several poems in The Rescued Year Stafford attributes his bent for the apt but off-center phrase to "a turn that is our family's own." At his best, he makes this turn into a way of handling poems which combines the precise with the strange, fact with a quirky but frequently illuminating vision. I read through the collected poems to see what happens to this turn as well as several other characteristic Staffordisms. It grows less and less prevalent as he goes on, mellowing into a ripeness of distinctive seeing which produces row after row of brilliant poems in the later work. The relationship of those turns, early and mellow, to the quietness which everyone speaks of, is one of the bases of Stafford's voice. There are other recurrent elements in his tonality, such as the vast compassion which used to seem mainly for the foresaken but turns out, as the collected poems show, to be for all of us. Stafford can touch us with a delicate grace, bringing over to us an understanding of how others face the difficulties of their ordinary pains and places. In a poem like "Elegy" the intensity of his understanding does not come out on the surface but it makes the surface come alive with feeling; and what he feels is about the ordinary because it is ordinary. But then Stafford has always been a populist of the imagination, and, whatever he does, that mode continues….

When the poems don't work we realize that his failures are the obverse of his successes, that what makes him good is also, when it goes wrong, what makes him bad. The worst of Stafford is flat and unfinished. He tries to bring off the precise level of pitch but cannot—usually, I think, because his perceptions are incomplete or his sense of their wholeness, their connections to each other, has not yet jelled. In those cases he cannot manage his seeing and his saying so that they reinforce each other, as they do in the best work. Indeed, we can recognize the best work by the presence of that reinforcement. Stafford used to have difficulty with his last lines, leaving some fine poems with throw-away endings, but there is far less of that in the later work. It may be that he can handle the endings better now because "the moment that hides in the breath / to be king when kingdoms end" is more apparent and seems far less unsettling. Whatever the case, the collected poems show the unevenness dropping away as his skills become second nature and his tonality—richer, more concentrated, in full ripeness—stays regularly under control. (p. 18)