Stones don't float

John Haag's career spans more than forty years, and his poetry is so unusual - and so sure of itself in the seemingly effortless way it marries serious music and original thoughtthat the reader searches in vain for signs that Haag has been influenced by the various fashions and trends that have breezed through American writing from Central and South America and Europe since the 1950s. A former student and friend of James Wright, a former merchant seaman, and now an orchidist, a mycologist, and a professor of writing, John Haag is a singer of songs about the natural world that his hearers can believe to be true, so deep and wide is the experience and the heart out of which they come. His poems are his travels, his travels his poems. Haag's timely and timeless accounts of the lands and seas he explores are nothing less than a careful cataloging of the limitless varieties of human love and longing.