Flight from Meaning

According to T.R. Hummer, “Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of apassionate, humanistic ethos.” His poems reflect “concern for humanity, andconcern for language, humanity’s best hope.” The poems in Haven’s new collection,The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by—and serve as responsesto—contemporary culture’s predilection for violence, spectacle, and distractionand the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

But for Haven, meaning is somethingrich, mysterious, and multi-layered, and our apprehension of it can only besustained by the imagination’s capacity to counter the tyranny of rationalism.

The Flight from Meaning contains meditations onAmerican history, on the nature of religion in our time, on racism and itslegacy in the post-Civil Rights era, and brings the reader to intimate poemsabout family in Haven’s industrial hometown in upstate New York, and to poems drawnfrom years of living and teaching in Beijing, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, andNew York City.

In the literary family towhich Stephen Haven belongs, his poems embrace both Dickinson and Whitman,Stevens and Frost, Eliot and Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Hass, CormacMcCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Roethke, Pasolini, Rilke, Glück, Trethewey,Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, and many others who dodge simplistic dichotomies infavor of the way  the ear, the eye, themind and feeling, achieve a lightness of being and a range of meaning thattrouble and enrich the heart of human experience.