The Flight from Meaning

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.

Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning strains at the limits of expression, trying to see past, around, and through layers of intellectually imposed "meaning" to the thing that drove him first to meaning: the poet's own past, family, and the natural world. The Flight from Meaning is also a flight toward the beauties of language, which the poet employs with angular and dazzling lyricism.

-Andrew Hudgins, author of Saints & Strangers and The Never-Ending

Through distant voyages, and more so through memory, Stephen Haven has crafted a haunting book-vesper-stained-one whose voice, traveling far to the page, captures the often invisible domestic: "Happiness a loaf of bread, the oven not yet cold, / Knowledge the quarter spoon of grain / That leavens dough." Poems throughout The Flight from Meaning are suffused with wisdom, grace, and the elusive present.

-Mark Irwin, author of Once When Green

Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning is masterful in its rubric of language poetry and its urgent and operatic call to the Anthropocene for new symbiotic memes. Each poem disrupts and interrogates the mundane, mirrors our "human place jungled in the dark," and in acts of flux removes scaffolding and counters the hubris of our times.

-Rosa Lane, author of Called Back

Stephen Haven's The Flight from Meaning was a finalist (in earlier form) for the International Beverly Prize for Literature. He has three earlier collections of poetry: The Last Sacred Place in North America, winner of the New American Poetry Prize, Dust and Bread, winner of the Ohio Poet of the Year award, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks.

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