PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HAVEN
“Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate humanistic ethos. Every word in this collection reflects concern: concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity’s best hope. Global in vision, this worried book is unflinching, yet hopeful, yielding up a world in which ‘Your own caesurae, / Your own circumference, / Is the shell of a missing animal. / You pull it tight around you like a cloak…’”
— T.R. HUMMER
“Stephen Haven’s The Last Sacred Place in North America celebrates human experience as an ongoing act of translation: between silence and language, inner and outer space, child and adult, life and death, Beijing and Heartland. Like the forbearers he invokes – Ishmael and Henry Adams – the speaker of these poems embarks on an ‘errand into the wilderness’ only to find himself exploring the thickets within. Haven’s poems movingly evoke our shared ‘sheared experience’ as they delineate the landscape of the human heart: our ‘last sacred place.'”
— ANGIE ESTES
“On his own eloquently ruminative, often speedily allusive ‘errand into the wilderness’ – whether that ‘wilderness’ be China or America – Stephen Haven discovers the rich textures of landscape, the bewildering array of cultural facts and forces, the colorful detritus of ever-simmering political contradictions, and how all the can inflect and pressure a single alert consciousness, or tinge with elegy the tight nexus of a single family. In thier moral questioning and aesthetic awareness, as well as in their practical attentiveness to the variously eccentric world as is, the precisely pitched poems and translations of The Last Sacred Place in North America provide a vade mecum of enriching meditations for any wakeful voyager.”
— EAMON GRENNAN
