In 1992, just months before his death, William Stafford responded to a call from the U.S. Forest Service to write a series of poems to appear on signs at scenic turnouts on the highway that twists through the eight-thousand-foot peaks rising from the Methow Valley in northern Washington state. Stafford's willingness to participate in such a democratic poetic project and the scenario itself—juxtaposing nature and poetry and the modern highway—serve as the perfect synecdoche for all Stafford's work. Starting with Down in My Heart (1947), a memoir of his time in a camp for conscientious objectors during World War II, and continuing through more than one thousand poems and many prose pieces, this prolific writer has grappled with his ambivalence about the blessings of modern technology and industry and the disappearing wilderness of the American West. Eschewing simple, nostalgic pastoralism, Stafford offers instead poems that look back...