<P>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 <I>For the Century’s End</I> 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.</P>