Flight from Meaning

<p>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 <em>The Flight from Meaning </em> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p><em>The Flight from Meaning </em>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.</p><p>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.</p>