"Ways to Live" is included along with other poems that Stafford produced in the last months of his life in The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, published posthumously by Graywolf Press in 1998.

Stafford was well known in poetry circles by the time his first book was published, but it was his second book Traveling through the Dark (1962) that attracted attention and established him as an important American author. Most of the poems from this volume have been reprinted in other collections, but it does help to experience them the way the original readers did.

Judith Kitchen is a preeminent Stafford scholar, who has published several books about the poet. Her most recent study of Stafford's poetry is Writing the Word: Understanding William Stafford, published in 1999 by Oregon State University Press.

In addition to being a poet, Stafford wrote...