The unpublished early poems of William Stafford now added to "a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of [the twentieth] century." (Library Journal)
If I could remember all at once―but I have forgotten.
But some day, looking along a furrowed cliff, staring
beyond the eyes' strength, I'll start the avalanche
and every stone will fall separate and revealed.
―from "Meditation"
Twenty-eight years old and a conscientious objector during World War II, William Stafford was assigned under penalty of law to work in camps, an internal exile within his own country. In this remarkable collection of poems, nearly all of them never before published, the first decade of Stafford's writing life is for the first time made available to readers. Edited by the poet Fred Marchant, one of
the first marine officers honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Another World Instead tells the story of a committed pacifist living in a time of war and a writer beginning a major life in American poetry.
