October 20, 2012

Review by Carol DerbyThe Last Sacred Place in North America by Stephen Haven

THE LAST SACRED PLACE IN NORTH AMERICA
by Stephen Haven

New American Press
2606 E. Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI 53211
ISBN: 978-0-9849439-0-6
2012, 98 pp., $14.95
www.NewAmericanPress.com

In The Last Sacred Place in North America Stephen Haven has built a seaworthy vessel, a container ship for everything from Ping Pong to the California Plum, from George Inness to Mark Rothko. I would confidently appoint a number of these poems to dwell in a time capsule to represent the turn of the 20th to 21st century in North America, while others could capably serve aboard some satellite as an introduction to intelligent life on Earth.

But knowing Stephen as I do, I read The Last Sacred Place as a very personal account of what occupies the mind of this poet, and what comes to his attention receives a kind of free association that is nimble and unfettered. Stephen Haven has so many active synapses in his brain that reading his poems is a bit like witnessing a trapeze artist alighting from one neural network to another, swinging from the learned past to the experienced present and back again. “The Longnook Seal” is a poem that revels in this kind of movement — from reading Henry Adams to watching the Deepwater Horizon underwater bleed in the Gulf of Mexico, to Colonial America en route to contemporary Provincetown. With the succession of failures to seal the BP valve off the coast of Louisiana to the seal of the title, the book posits the vulnerability of life on a Cape Cod beach. That all of this coalesces into a cautionary tale about the fate of a civilization bent on plundering will come as no surprise to Haven’s readers. Nor will the high wire attempt for some glimpse of beauty in all of it, which the poem delivers in the last stanza.

While the landscape shifts from the Gulf to New England, from Amsterdam, New York to Ashland, Ohio and on to Chongqing and Beijing ,China throughout this volume, Haven first centers each poem and then casts a wide net around it. There is, in this approach, a constant regard for “the silent power of the periphery” as the poem “Minute Man” puts it. Sometimes this silent power is the human, daily existence in which larger events occur. In other poems, like “Minute Man” the quiet missiles now presided over by the National Park Services are called upon to explain why their destructive silent power should still linger over our human daily existence. This tension between what is plainly, openly happening and what is “off in the shade somewhere” is a trademark of Haven’s poetry and is reminiscent of Auden in “Musee de Beaux Arts”: “…how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

It took this reader a while to get into the rhythm of this synchronicity in The Last Sacred Place, with the title suggesting we’ll be dropping anchor right there, over the last sacred place and contemplating it, while bobbing on the surface. But this volume of poems refuses to be still. The only anchor for this bounding might be summed up by a line in the poem, “Stole,” which begins in the moment when the poet’s father has died. Starting there, with the stop of a life, sets up some expectation that from there, we can only go backward in time, and remember the man as he was. Instead the poem stays in the active present, takes off into decisions to be made, belongings to be gathered, and when a La-Z-Boy is about to be pressed into service as a modern day litter for the body, the poem offers this:

“Don’t worry, my brother said,/Strange things might happen in this exact moment.”

By way of entry into this heady mix, I had some help. On the same day that I began this book, with its American Buffalo (or, as I have learned to call more accurately, a bison) on the cover, I read an account in the New York Times about a white bison calf that had been born, not on the Great Plains as one would expect, but at a small dairy in Connecticut called Mohawk Bison Farms. That this reported “one in 10 million” event occurred in such a place would likely have resonance for Haven (who also wrote “The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks”). It is also just another way I’ve come to marvel at how Haven’s poems tap into the fault lines of American history.

Viewed as a sacred event in the eyes of many American Indians, the Lakota tribe members from South Dakota as well as tribal elders from the Mohawk, Seneca and Cayuga tribes traveled to Goshen, Connecticut to welcome what they understood to be a harbinger of good fortune that had come to an unsuspecting farmer by the name of Peter Fay. It was Barbara Threecrow, an elder from the Naticoke tribe who lives in Hudson Valley, New York, who said “I believe this is an awakening. This is a way of telling people to remember the sacredness of all of life.”

I knew how much Stephen would enjoy this synchronicity of life reverberating with The Last Sacred Place. I wish I’d had some connection to an American Indian who could have invited Stephen to that event, because I trust he would have translated for all of us, as earnestly as he does the Chinese poems in this book, all that it meant to that very sudden community of Goshen and Lakota, Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga and Naticoke tribes. As Farmer Fay put it, “I think it’s not coincidence that all this stuff is happening… The country is now in pretty sad shape, so you never know what can help. But for now, I’m just trying to learn about it.”

That birth served me well as an escort into this latest volume of Haven’s. Given its breadth, I’d be willing to wager that upon picking it up, you might just experience your own uncanny encounter with a sacred place that resonates with you, something so silently powerful that might leave you wanting to learn more.

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Carol Derby is an unpublished poet who has studied with Lawrence Rabb, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, and Billy Collins. She lives and works in New York City as Director of Environmental Strategy for a prominent textile company. She spends her spare time reading, writing poetry, practicing yoga, and traveling, often back to Western Massachusetts where she was born in 1960.

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February 25, 2010

Review by Mary SaylerDust and Bread by Stephen Haven

DUST AND BREAD
by Stephen Haven

Turning Point
P.O. Box 541106
Cincinnati, Ohio 45254-1106
ISBN 978-1932339024
2008, 100 pp., $17.00
www.turningpointbooks.com

Conventional wisdom in reading and writing contemporary poetry consistently encourages us to enter into the experience of a poem, so that’s what I aimed to do in reading Dust and Bread, the latest book of poetry by Stephen Haven, which drew me on several levels. For one thing, his familiarity with life in China appealed to me greatly since the closest I’ve come is once naming a beige Chow puppy “Beijing.” Also, he’s an Ohio man, whereas I’m a lifelong Southerner who’s resistant to being belled. More importantly, he teaches a MFA program, while I’m a self-taught student who began studying and writing poems as a child.

Duly drawn by an exotic culture and the poet’s impressive credentials, I came to this book, wanting to be taught, wanting to learn, and, especially, wanting to experience the poems. Neither the often-exquisite lines nor my reading disappointed me, but—oh, I’d better get it over with—my experience of Dust and Bread occasionally made me feel, well, annoyed. To be specific, those annoying elements included the title, an out-of-context line, and a couple of words to which I objected.

To start with the title: Reading through lenses well-grounded in Holy Scripture, I could not help but see the biblical connotations rising from the Dust and Bread. In the pre-Christian era, for instance, repentant people sometimes showed remorse by covering themselves in dust and ashes, while, by contrast, the Lord’s Prayer or Our Father in the New Testament requests daily forgiveness and daily bread. So, right away, I began to wonder who would forgive whom and for what and why.

In addition to Eucharist or communion where church members receive bread as the representation, reminder, or actual presence of the body of Christ, inherent with forgiveness, the biblical expression of “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” refers to brevity of life. On a secular or physical level, dust occurs daily and just is. Similarly bread represents the daily sustenance needed to live, calling to mind our bodies’ need of bread and water to survive. So what do these contrasts between life and death, between the secular and the religious, between well-crafted, often gorgeous lines, and a mundane title have to do with this book? Frankly, my dear, I’m not sure.

Until you experience these poems yourself, however, everything I say may seem abstract, so let’s look at one of my favorite pieces, “Willow.” This book-opening poem begins, “All China a green-gold row of them./ When you walk through – / delicate, skirted, light-limbed/ and yellow, swishing their loveliness/ in the wind – they brush the whole of you.” I’ve now read those lines many times and each time truly experienced the grace of that moment and musicality of that scene where “one single tree” becomes “the parasol of thousands.” Although the next line adds “of years of poetry,” I preferred the initially-evoked image of people, who could be from any willow-friendly place or culture, experiencing the passage of time under that exquisite parasol.

That apt word and many other fitting descriptions aid the beauty of this book, even when it’s not a pretty sight. For instance, “Skunked” offers a clear picture and dry wit in the second verse: “But how strange to carry, on your body,/ a small piece of the highway,/ white-split blacktop/ signaling the world to pass.” How quietly clever and just right! Similarly, there’s the just right observation of the unborn child in “Ultrasound” as “Your mother sings, not exactly to you” and how the soon-to-be-parents “looked in to see, five months early,/ you, floating in your beginning./ The peninsular pieces of yourself.” Anyone who has had the joy of viewing a similar picture via ultrasound knows the rightness of that description and even the look somewhat like “The dry black husks of watermelon seeds” scattered on a “slab floor.” No matter how poetic and descriptive though, those seeds seemed to be disembodied from the historical diversion of the “one boiled goose egg” in the previous verse and the moon refusing to show itself in the verse after, thus evoking my second experience of annoyance.

It’s as though the popularly poetic intent of high compression had squeezed the words into something mystifying, rather than mysterious, which mainly annoyed me because I truly wanted to know more. For instance, I really wanted to hear “another echo too,/ some silence stuffed/ down your mother’s throat.” Since the poem is dedicated “To my daughter, five months before her birth” in China, one might presume the silence to regard the coming of a girl-child, who, reportedly, would not be welcomed in that country at that time, but the collage of past, present, and future images collides, making it difficult to separate what from what.

One of the more accessible poems, “Waxing,” raises questions, too, when “seeds are for swallowing” and “when no one leaf formally finishes itself,” but I found this poem enticing, unified, and not at all annoying. Indeed, the brevity, beauty, and believability of the poem drew me to read the lovely lines aloud several times, each time experiencing the pleasure of interesting thoughts and credible imagery, for instance in the ending where “The moon exists from all sides at once:/ Blind eye, sinkhole, searchlight.”

Similarly, I read “Blue Flame” again and again, each time being let into the poem by the clarity of the opening scene until jolted into my third experience of annoyance. The line, “I know we live under the light touch/ of heaven’s scam” lost me with the word “scam.” Yes, I admit that, as a person of faith, I found the word wobbling toward the offensive, but that wasn’t my problem. As do people in general, poets have the right to believe whatever they want. They do not, however, have the right to charm me into entering an early morning scene between a father and son as they leisurely begin their day only to throw a scam on the table with the oatmeal. The abrupt change of mood and tone gave me a whiplash and broke the sweet mood, which the poem then resumes in the next verse as “The day comes soft shoeing,/ all doe-eyed, the womb’s wonder/ of the sky.”

My complaint about that poem continues in the final annoyance experienced in the word “conjugates,” when, again, the mood, tone, and, now, imagery reel from the adverse effect of a clever, showy word choice over a quieter one that would cooperate nicely with the line. i.e., “Somewhere,/ half a day and half the world away,/ the red flag of morning snaps/ at half-mast above our own/ holy fire as it conjugates itself/ across a cross-less altar.” But, having expressed my negative reaction, which I cannot take back without altering the actual experience, I’ll now turn to the response that comes from looking up an odd word or, seemingly, out-of-context word a poet selects. In this case, conjugation as “a class of verbs with similar inflectional forms” comes last in Webster’s, even though its connotations may continue to rank first for readers in general. Regardless, the word used is, in fact, conjugate not conjugation, and in this, the poet selected a word meaning to couple, yoke, or join, which immediately makes a connection between the world in America and the one left behind in China and between a Christian and a non-Christian environment too. Again, though, my objection is not based on religion and the rights thereof, but on the strain to treat perpendicular lines as parallel, especially if those lines intersect in the child in the room.

Despite the “scam,” I will not keep holding this poem over the “Blue Flame” since a dictionary reminder of true meaning and a little more information in the remaining lines doused my annoyance. For instance, the poems gets on with life and the day as “everything slips/ to its opposite. Cold burns.” Yes! And I can attest to this today on an unusually frigid morning in Florida as the temperature rises in the 20’s.

Also, as I write, a New Year has just begun with resolutions to slow down, write more poems, and experience each day more fully. “Blue Flame” touches on this, too, as “The morning’s hot celestial wax/ drips into the seal of our/ rushed footprints.” Like most of the poems in this book, that one makes me want to know what else the poet has to say and how well readers will conjugate the experience. If the veil lifts from the lines and the dust begins to settle, I suspect the poetry of Stephen Haven will be received as bread and experienced with the warmth of a blue flame at home and in Pulitzer circles.

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Mary Harwell Sayler, a freelance writer and poet, began judging poems entered in the annual writing competition sponsored by www.writers-editors.com in 1999, but she’s worked with other poets and writers much longer than that, first through her home study course and now critiques and the website she recently revised, www.poetryofcourse.com.

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