"An evocative poet, so good at his best that no one interested in poetry today should be ignorant of his work." --Anne Stevenson, Contemporary Poets of the English Language "...I feel that Squires deserves consideration as one of the finest American poets writing today. ..one experiences a sense of excitement mixed with awe that one rarely gets with contemporary poetry." --Dana Gioia, Hudson Review "... A great and extraordinary strength of Radcliffe Squires' poetry is the force and cogency of its design, concretely realized, poem by poem..." -- Brewster Ghiselin, The Sewanee Review "... poems that are powerfully evocative ...a struggle for knowledge and insight in a world often mysteriously cruel... many of his best poems are unassumingly personal..." --David Mason, Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry "It is as though Mr. Squires had simply turned a corner in his mind and beheld an entirely new, more beautiful, and infinitely profounder field of interest..." -- James Dickey, The New York Times Book Review "...he brings us to....the hidden spring of life. Thus he confounds our thoughtlessly held distinctions between life and death, spirit and matter." -Emily Grosholz, New England Review "I venture the guess that many of these poems must endure as long as English poems are read... when the time has had a chance to sift the chaff from the cliques Radcliffe Squires will come to be recognized as one of the most valid singers of life now at work among us." --John Ciardi, The Western Humanities Review
About the Author: Radcliffe Squires was born on May 5, 1917 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The son of a barber, he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1940. He served in the Navy during World War II, and began his graduate studies after the war at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree and co-founded the literary magazine Chicago Review in 1946. He was awarded a PhD from Harvard University in 1952. After teaching at Dartmouth College, Squires joined the University of Michigan as an instructor of English language and literature in 1952, where he began a long teaching career. During his three decade teaching career, he served as mentor for several winners of the University of Michigan's prestigious student writing awards, the Hopwood Awards, including poets Anne Stevenson, Nancy Willard, and Donald Beagle (Editor of Radcliffe Squires: Selected Poems). After his retirement in 1982, Squires continued to teach seminars for first-year students and remained active as an essayist and reviewer.[1] His work appeared in numerous magazines, such as The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Squires was the author of seven books of poetry, one novel, and numerous critical books and essays. Squires accepted an invitation to read a number of his poems for audio recording and historical preservation at the Library of Congress on April 18, 1977, as part of the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, sponsored by the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. He also served as the editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Radcliffe Squires died in 1993 of an abdominal aneurysm at Ann Arbor University Hospital in Michigan at the age of 75. He outlived his wife, the former Eileen Mulholland, who died in 1976.