Traveling through the Dark

Traveling through the Dark is the collection that brought William Stafford wide attention, winning the National Book Award for poetry in 1963. Its title poem describes a driver who comes upon a dead doe on a narrow mountain road at night and must decide what to do with her. Across the book, Stafford writes in a calm, conversational voice about the plains and small towns of Kansas, where he grew up, the forests and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, where he lived and taught, and the quiet moral choices that ordinary days present. Many of the poems consider family, landscape, weather and the place of one person in a large and indifferent world. The collection suits readers who prefer clear, unadorned poetry that rewards slow rereading.