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—an American predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction–the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.
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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 coercion of a narrow 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.
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Judge’s Comments, International Beverly Prize for Literature:
“This is an accomplished collection which is impressively sure of itself. It primarily responds to – and if not pays homage then at least continues a conversation with – the Italian poet, film director and general enfant (homme?) terrible Pier Paolo Pasolini. However, the literary influences and nods run much wider than this, ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Larkin and Henry Adams.... The thematic concerns are equally wide-ranging; astrophysics, quantum mechanics, alienation, travel, love, religion and the search for lost time.”                                             ~~Niall Bourke