The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks

Poetry

Runner-up for the 2002 Philip Levine Prize, California State University, Fresno (West End/University of New Mexico Press, 2004)

Stephen Haven understands the sawdust-in-the-pores desolation of old mill towns with their poisoned rivers: places where "the sky is an indigenous gray," and salvation must be imagined from the grit of what is. Most remarkably, he infuses this "lost architecture" with a terrifying elegance. Haven's vision gives sustenance because we recognize its accuracy and take comfort in a grace as unsparing as it is profound. There is nothing facile here, no easy epiphanies, just the steadfast gaze of a poet who deeply understands the American psyche in its past and present guises, a history peopled by deviant Puritans, vandals, and outcasts, the power of a place we can leave that will never leave us. Ablaze with intelligence and a fierce musicality, his poems are indelible.
--Alice Fulton

“Stephen Haven understands the sawdust-in-the-pores desolation of old mill towns with their poisoned rivers: places where “the sky is an indigenous gray,” and salvation must be imagined from the grit of what-is. Most remarkably, he infuses this “lost architecture” with a terrifying eloquence. Haven’s vision gives sustenance because we recognize its accuracy and take comfort in a grace as unsparing as it is profound. There is nothing facile here, no easy epiphanies, just the steadfast gaze of a poet who deeply understands the American psyche in its past and present guises, a history peopled by deviant Puritans, vandals, and outcasts, the power of a place we can leave that will never leave us. Ablaze with intelligence and a fierce musicality, his poems are indelible.

- Alice Fulton

“A magnificently drawn world, rich in feeling and association…”
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- Richard Jackson

“With the eye of a novelist and the ear of a poet, Stephen Haven preserves the “long adolescent years” that still shadow him, growing up with a minister father among factories… He sings his own ‘silken solo of the maimed.’”

- Elton Glaser

“Stephen Haven is one of our vital poets. Whether personal or historical, his work is always on the mark. His lines are full of Bach and beer, rectory and rectitude, which is to say they’re full of life.”
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- Robert Phillip

Working-Class Notes

Joshua Mays

Spring 2006

With his poetry, Stephen Haven proves that working-class literature may exist independently from the workplace. It is quickly apparent that Haven did not set out to write about work or workers, though many of his poems are set in a working-class environment. Haven concentrates on the personal moments, the private thoughts, and situations working-class people find themselves in outside of the factory or workplace. The result is a rich portrait of the American soul.

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