Next year—Gods and Muses, Graces and Fates willing—William Stafford will quietly turn 70…. And it's about time to ask: is there a more exemplary poet among us?…

William Stafford has produced a stream of steady lyrics. There is no stylish violence about them: they are calm, alert, ruminative poems, spoken sotto voce. They may address so-called clichés and abstractions, like "love" or "truth," but in a self-effacing, unegotistical fashion: their method is exploratory, not declamatory. Stafford knows his place in the order of things, knows his "Vocation," in the title of an early poem, whose last line summarizes his entire enterprise: "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be." (p. 88)

Like his other volumes, [A Glass Face in the Rain] marks no surprising or gratuitous shift in direction for Stafford's poetry: it simply continues the conversation left off in Stories That...