Sage & Discipline

50 years in the life of a poet who has deliberately lived a life outside the academy, writing poems that come from direct engagement with the natural world, a heritage of working class experience and connection, and a conviction that poetry can play a crucial role in our everyday life, both as readers and creators. Samuel Green has spent a lifetime writing from the locus of place, grounded in his beloved Pacific Northwest. This gathering of poems from his prior collections lends testimony to that major preoccupation. Whether he is writing about interactions with the environment, with other people, with the often difficult fact vs. myth of family, with wartime service, with loss and grief, Green's work is always immediate and honest.