SOURCE: A Review of Mysticism for Beginners, in The Hudson Review, Vol. LI, No. 3, Autumn, 1998, pp. 609-11.

In the following excerpt, Haines praises the historical consciousness, and the concentrated imagery of the poems in Mysticism for Beginners.

…To turn from Stafford's poems to the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski² is to depart from a familiar terrain and enter another space altogether, strangely removed from our still coherent neighborhoods:

 Europe is already sleeping, Night's animals,
mournful and rapacious
move in for the kill.
Soon America will be sleeping too.
"Houston, 6 p.m." 

I think I would know, without being told, that these lines were not written by an American. Indeed, it is hardly possible to find in this slim book a poem in which the history of our time is not in some way acknowledged. The events, the terrible absences, are there, even when not directly referred to.

 The train...