Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
The Flight from Meaning by Stephen Haven
book review by Terry McDonagh.
The Flight from Meaning can be purchased here:
https://slantbooks.org/books/the-flight-from-meaning/
At first glance, a title like The Flight from Meaning, seems somehow inappropriate and not quite fitting in the context of this magnificent collection by American poet, Stephen Haven. This work is no flight from meaning – it’s the exact opposite – no ambiguity – it’s a headlong flight into meaning – an escape from one-dimensional thinking – outlined so succinctly in the title poem, The Flight from Meaning. We are invited to turn our backs on all things distasteful and concentrate on the double rainbow/ the street musician/our still capacity for wonder/Gothic architecture/and it hardly ever rained. But, in the words of the poet: in the flight from meaning no one fully escapes/The mass of humanity neither innocent nor guilty. It’s as if he’s entreating us to be realistic and understanding – the human is not only good.
The true meaning of The Flight from Meaning becomes clearer when we immerse ourselves in a child crying/ Old Church Photographs. Iowa City, 1983 – I couldn’t stop reading this poem. It’s got that chaotic illogicality that comes with its time – expressing young emotions and the richness of human experience. The second last line, I remember best the cartography of each failed kindness.
I turn to the first poem in the collection, Rope Tied to a Song, April. 10, 1975 and read, The war goes on… and Somewhere in Saigon there is singing…The killing still goes on. This poem is disturbing and infectious – hard to leave. It has to be read aloud – a kind of mantra. The killing goes on. The war goes on. I am many miles from that place, and yet I feel it/ as a kind of home, the thick hemp tied to a song. The church bells ring and the war goes on. This is the place I choose to raise a ceremonial glass/The body remembers water, win/the near stillness. We celebrate with the celebrant and all the while the turbulences, meaningless wars, disturbances and shenanigans with ‘filthy lucre’ carry on unabated. We encounter human experience on and between every line.
The book bulges with lived experiences as the poet celebrates the experience of travel,
past and family. He flees from the so-called true ‘meaning’ of life into the really-real search for the role of Homo Sapiens in a complex world, and he achieves this in richly-crafted language. In Solo we’re in Dresden; a communist-bloc city; there are drinks in Macedonia and we go belly-up in Ubud but home and family are ever present…Home seasoning where you tithed…Happiness a loaf of bread, the oven not yet cold…His language shines and dazzles; it pushes at the outer limits of meaning. Happiness a loaf of bread sums up family values without need for further explanation. He switches little lights on and we are enlightened.
In some ways, you could conclude, Haven is taking us on an American social history trip while, at the same time allowing us, in faraway places, to become fully engrossed in every aspect of his journey. We want to read on – to relive our own experiences with him.
In the final poem in the collection, Three Stories that House Us, Stephen Haven sums up – not just this his stance on life and poetry – but his entire philosophy and outlook on what it means to be truly human, we are always only becoming, we can never quite become. We must stop and think, immersed as we are in this richness of human experience, in beautifully crafted, accessible language.
A review like this this can be nothing more than a prompt. Each poem is an experience in itself. The book is a must read – reading takes time, but it is time well spent.
© Terry McDonagh
Terry McDonagh, poet and dramatist, has worked in Europe, Asia and Australia. He’s taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at Hamburg International School. Published fifteen poetry collections, as well as letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. In March 2022, he was poet in residence and Grand Marshal as part of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Brussels. His work has been translated into German, Indonesian and Arabic. His poem, ‘UCG by Degrees’ is included in the Galway Poetry Trail on Galway University campus. He’s been a voice and narrator on several RTE radio dramas (All Points West production) for young people. In 2020, Two Notes for Home – a two-part radio documentary, compiled and presented by Werner Lewon, on The Life and Work of Terry McDonagh, The Modern Bard of Cill Aodáin. His latest poetry collections: A) An eBook ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Not Dead’ – Live Encounters Publishing. B) ‘I Write Because’ – Calendar Road Press. After more than thirty years in Hamburg, he returned to live in County Mayo in 2019.
Stephen Haven’s fourth book of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published by Slant Books in February 2025. In earlier form, The Flight from Meaning was a finalist for England’s International Beverly Prize for Literature. His earlier collections are The Last Sacred Place in North America, winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread, for which Haven was awarded the Ohio Poet of the Year prize; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, North American Review, Image, Salmagundi, Arts & Letters, The Common, The European Journal of International Law, World Literature Today, Blackbird, and other journals. His book-length memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk, was published by Syracuse University Press. With Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong, in 2021 he published the 300-page (Mandarin and English) anthology of collaborative translations, Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China (Twelve Winters Press). He has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. More details at www.stephenhaven.com.
The Flight from Meaning can be purchased here:
https://slantbooks.org/books/the-flight-from-meaning/