Poet and essayist John Haines has forged, in his long career, a body of work noted both for its austere lyric beauty, anchored in the solitude and spaciousness of his early years as a homesteader in the Alaskan wilderness, and for its penetrating responsiveness to the human condition. The generous selection of poems in "For the Century's End" conveys, in form and substance, the singular and exhilarating power of Haines's poetry of the past decade, underscoring his role as one of the major writers of our time.