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.