Poet and essayist John Haines. Haines' new book The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, recalls the 25 years he spent homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness. Haines is more than "one of our best nature writers," according to Hayden Carruth of Harpers Magazine. Carruth writes that Haines "knows the ecological crisis ... as a crisis of consciousness, the human mind in ultimate confrontation with itself.