[In Writing the Australian Crawl, William Stafford] gathers together articles, lectures, addresses and interviews on matters of poetic inspiration, composition, technique and purpose. Now this brand of book is not unusual. It is a relatively contemporary practise for writers, in effect, "to clean out their desks" by assembling odds and ends of their works, superimposing an order of sorts, and giving it a catchy title. The result is an instant book. To some extent, this is the pattern Stafford follows. However, what distinguishes Writing the Australian Crawl is the engaging, emerging profile of Stafford as creator and personality….

Stafford generally has been appreciated as a plain talking but remarkably effective and influential American poet, one who has paradoxically fashioned a part of the mainstream of American poetry by keeping apart from its trends and politics. And this is the Stafford we discover in this collection of creative position...