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Announces the poetry winners of the Yankee Awards, for 1996 in the United States. Major awards; Segondorph Memorial Prizes; Yankee Print Award; Sponsors.

Presents the author's recollections of what the South Danbury Christian Church in New Hampshire has meant to him throughout his life. How he returned to the church in 1975 after the death of his grandmother; How he enjoyed attending church as a youngster summering with his grandparents; How he realized he was being drawn back to the church as an adult; The minister, Jack Jensen; Importance of the church community; The author's spiritual journey; More.

The article focuses on Henry Adams's "History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison." The book is a monument of American literature. Professional historians have become reticent about attributing literary qualities to history. Among the genres of literature, history is especially ambitious because it combines study of character, discrimination of probability, moral judgment, and of course imagination. Adams's style does not call attention to itself so much. The central insight of this book, point of departure to which it returns again and again, is a notion that may sound commonplace--people do the opposite of what they say they do. For all his tone of detachment, Adams grabs people by the scruff of the neck, lifts off the ground, and screams in the ear. Adams cannot get over the Jeffersonian paradox--the man who was elected to decentralize the federal government centralized it more than any Federalist could have done. Old John Adams was president of the almost unrecognizable United States of the first seven chapters of Henry Adams's "History."

The Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize of $10,000, awarded annually for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States by an American, is sponsored by the New Hope Foundation in conjunction with The Nation. This year the prize has been awarded to John Haines for his book "New Poems: 1980-88." John Haines was born in 1924 and originally intended to become a painter rather than a poet; he studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art. His early work distinguished itself by combining lucid images from the natural world with a dreamy inwardness. The later work collected in "New Poems: 1980-88," retains these qualities-sense and the imagination-while it adds more of the world and more of Haines's rigorous intelligence.

Enjoys the beauty of the morning in New Hampshire. Description of the landscape around Mt. Kearsarge in the months of November through February; Emergence of green as spring turns into summer; Contentment as absorbedness; Evading absorbedness turns into enjoying absorbedness; Recollections of grandparents living in the same place; Renouncing guilt; Prediction by Ortega y Gassett of the vertical invasion of barbarians.

Opinion. Presents the author's views about `Country,' a working farm or an empty barn presiding over hayfield returning to forest. Author's comments on `Country' as a landscape and as an ethical idea; Information about `Commercial County Cute' (CCC); Effects of condominiums to farm lands.

An essay is presented on the significant influence of several poets in the U.S. The author mentions the works of several poets and authors such as T. S. Elliot, Danny O'Neill, and Edgar Allan Poe, which inspire him due to their respective styles and themes. He also commends the poets' greatest pedagogical influence on the works of the young authors.