According to T.R. Hummer, ?Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a
passionate, humanistic ethos.? His poems reflect ?concern for humanity, and
concern for language, humanity's best hope.? The poems in Haven's new collection,
The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by?and serve as responses
to?contemporary culture's predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction
and the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.
But for Haven, meaning is something
rich, mysterious, and multi-layered, and our apprehension of it can only be
sustained by the imagination's capacity to counter the tyranny of rationalism.
The Flight from Meaning contains meditations on
American history, on the nature of religion in our time, on racism and its
legacy in the post-Civil Rights era, and brings the reader to intimate poems
about family in Haven's industrial hometown in upstate New York, and to poems drawn
from years of living and teaching in Beijing, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, and
New York City.
In the literary family to
which Stephen Haven belongs, his poems embrace both Dickinson and Whitman,
Stevens and Frost, Eliot and Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Hass, Cormac
McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Roethke, Pasolini, Rilke, Glück, Trethewey,
Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, and many others who dodge simplistic dichotomies in
favor of the way the ear, the eye, the
mind and feeling, achieve a lightness of being and a range of meaning that
trouble and enrich the heart of human experience.
