William Stafford Books

Chaosium, since 1978, has been such a radical leap ahead in the evolutionary depuration of RPGs that it is comparable to having been able to use submarines and computers in the victorian age, while the rest of the world used, well, whatever they used in that age. Amongst one of the many revolutionary concepts developed by Chaosium since then, was a universal game system for all of their products. This book is the synthesized version of that system. It includes all you need to understand, play and adapt one of the best game systems ever devised to any world you may ever create, in barely 16 pages of text (plus the 2 covers). Well described and thoroughly exemplified this book is more than worth it's price.
This book does not contain however a fully described world nor bestiary. This book is mainly for those who would like to build upon a set of outstanding rules framework.

System overview: Uses 7 characteristics (ranging 3-18). Skill based (percentages), so actions are resolved rolling d100. Uses all dice (d4 to d20). Uses backgrounds during PC generation. No artificial restrictions for equipment or occupations.

This Book is about a king who lives in a castle. He has a baker called Adrian.The King always eats eggs. Adrian makes the king chicken eggs,goose eggs,duck eggs.Then he shouts More More More! The Next day he read in his Newspaper that a dodos egg was spotted on an island.So he told Adrian to prepare the boat.To get to The island.

Stafford was a great poet; he also writes about writing like a great teacher. I heartily endorse this book to anyone who has read "Writing the Austrialian Crawl." If you haven't read that book, read it first, and then read this one. This book is a posthumous collection of magazine articles, interviews, and other scattered writings. While it is delight to me, and anyone else who loved Stafford, it is not as effective at demonstrating Stafford's approach to writing. That said, Stafford's generosity and humanity shine in this collection. It is worth reading, even if you are not a writer.

As a review of this book, I offer only that after reading less than a third of it, I ordered additional copies to give away to others. I can't think of another time that I have done this. Expect to be prodded by humor and deep thinking, and moved to joy and tears by Stafford's reflections on war and peace.

Although literary studies have gone through significant changes in recent years, it is always a good idea to look back and re-view how old scholarship has confronted canonical texts in a different context and time. This book is a good sample of such works.

"What disregards man does man good," wrote Stafford in one of his better known and often anthologized poems, one about sightseers on the astonishing Oregon seacoast.
I purchased this special edition of Northwest Review when it was new and required reading for Professor Glen Love's terrific course in Literature of the Pacific Northwest, at the University of Oregon. Now I seem to have misplaced it and am desperate to find a replacement copy. If anyone happens to have one available, I am willing to pay handsomely for it.

William Stafford is one of my favorite poets. His poetry is direct and as he once said, "much like talk." His subject matter is commonplace ("Volkswagen," "Why I am Happy," "Our Neighborhood"), often rural (he lives on a lake in Oregon), and open-palm honest and immediate ("You were a princess, lost; I/was a little bird. Nobody cared/where we went or how we sang").

His poetry is simple (as opposed to being grandiose or reaching for large effects), and it's in that simplicity that he serves up the most pleasure:

Now stand up. The old law says
work for pay. Try that shovel
or this broom, just to see
how it is, for a while.

This collection was published in 1987 and is as good if not better than the dozens of volumes by Stafford that preceded it. The book offers up a healthy number of poems (116); most are short (fewer than 25 lines). There is excellent work here by a wonderful poet.

The last book of William Stafford's from Harper is perhaps not the best first book of his to read - but, as one might expect given his maturity, these poems are sparser and even more apparently simple than some of his earlier work. As always with a William Stafford book the poems range over a variety of styles and although the poems are not directly linked, as you read more of Stafford, all his work in a sense forms one whole. Perhaps more than any review it is better to offer the title poem:

Passwords
A PROGRAM OF POEMS

Might people stumble and wander
for not knowing the right words,
and get lost in their wandering?

So--should you stand in the street
answering all passwords
day and night for any stranger?

You couldn't do that.
But sometimes your words
might link especially to some other person.

Here is a package,
a program of passwords.
It is to bring strangers together.

The warmth and reality that is exhibited in William Stafford's poetry books is always outstanding - and this book is no exception. I'm glad I was able to add this one to my collection of his work.

I picked up William Stafford's "Stories That Could Be True" at my community college library because Garrison Keillor had said that morning (January 17) that it was Stafford's birthday. I opened the book and found a poem, "Birthday," which begins, "We have a dog named 'Here'.... That wasn't quite what I was looking for, so I flipped through the pages and found "A Message from the Wanderer": "Today outside your prison I stand/ and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;/ you have relatives outside. And there are/ thousands of ways to escape..... This book got me reading poetry again, after many years of not reading. I can't find the book now--it's out of print and unavailable--but I'm looking for other books by the same author. Read a few of these poems, and I'll bet you'll be looking, too!