Dust and Bread [Paperback]

Stephen Haven (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven is a book of many geographies. Its elegantly-crafted poems span the world from China to the ground right under our feet, and take the widest public and most intimately personal subjects as their focus. Unifying the diverse themes is a textured music that sings of the "pang of hunger in the belly of a mammal, sway of the living tree."

From the Back Cover

"The poise and confidence of Stephen Haven's poems are in abundant display in his new collection. The poems range widely, from the People's Republic of China to Cabeza de Vaca, from canny elegies and homages to artists and writers to acutely rendered and pathos-laden portraits of domestic life. And yet, for all the variety and technical mastery of the collection, its most distinctive quality is that hard-won maturity of vision that James Wright famously called `the poetry of a grown man.' He offers us moments which are, as one poem puts it, `radiant and shared,' and for these offerings we can be grateful."--David Wojahn

"Stephen Haven's Dust and Bread is an intensely moving and eloquent book of poems. Much of it centers upon memories of China, much on memories of American childhood. It is a book, not just individual elegies and meditations, and portrays the authentic awakening to self of a poet's soul through experiential crisis."--Harold Bloom

"Whether he is nursing a headache in Beijing, praising famous men or contemplating fatherhood and family, Haven gives his reader a patient interior journey where compassion and joy are in abundance. Dust and Bread is an admirable achievement and offers a strong sense of what it means to be an American man negotiating personal and global trials in the 21st century."--Marilyn Chin

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: WordTech Communications (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932339027
• ISBN-13: 978-1932339024
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,797,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen Haven's book of poems Dust and Bread (Turning Point) was selected by the Ohio Poetry Association as co-winner for the 2008 prize awarded to the best book of poems published by an Ohio writer. On the basis of Dust and Bread Haven was named "Co-Ohio Poet of the Year" for 2009. Haven is also the author of one earlier collection of poems, The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004), and of the memoir, The River Lock: One Boy's Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). The River Lock was nominated for a National Book Award by Syracuse University Press. A review of The River Lock is available online at http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Haven.html

Haven published one other title in 2008, a limited edition chapbook of collaborative translations of contemporary Chinese poetry--The Enemy in Defensive Positions (with Wang Shouyi and Jin Zhong, Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, University of Tennessee--Chattanooga). He also edited and wrote the introduction for The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993), and co-edited two anthologies of contemporary American poetry.

Haven's poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Parnassus, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Literary Imagination, World Literature (Beijing), Image, Crazyhorse, and in many other journals. He has a Ph.D. in American Civilization (literature, intellectual history, and American painting) from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom, and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He is Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University, where he also serves as Director of the Ashland Poetry Press.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars 2008 Ohio Book Award Winner, August 13, 2009

By 

Ann Wysocki - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dust and Bread (Paperback)

Stephen Haven's Dust and Bread was selected by the Ohio Poetry Association as co-winner for the annual award given to the best book of poems published by an Ohio poet. On the basis of Dust and Bread, Haven was named "Co-Ohio Poet of the Year" for 2009. The following review of Dust and Bread, by Luke Hankins, appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of The Indiana Review:

Stephen Haven's Dust and Bread opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson's poem #575: "An Awe if it should be like that / Upon the Ignorance steals--." In this collection, Haven's poems present ignorance as a pathway to awe. The tourist or visitor is the primary metaphor in the first section of the book, a metaphor which resonates throughout the collection as a way of thinking about all situations in which one feels dislocated, unknowledgeable, or inexperienced. And in a larger sense, the metaphor comes to address the fundamental human condition.

In "Blossom," the speaker, an American visiting the Summer Palace in Beijing, wonders, "What can a tourist know? The past / is made of stone." It is clear that we are being presented the humble tourist, one who acknowledges his limitations regarding a history and a culture other than his own. This is the model Haven would hold up for the reader as a paradigm for life in the broadest sense. Humility of this kind--a willingness to admit and accept ignorance--bears much resemblance to Keats' idea of negative capability. This collection can be seen as an explicit exploration of what Keats described as a capacity for "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

The first section of the book explores (presumably) Haven's own experience as an American visiting Beijing, which is the setting for deep complexities and conflicts in his experience of the world. In Beijing, he both witnesses the birth of his child and meditates on the Tiananmen Square massacre, which some members of his wife's family experienced firsthand. In "Ultrasound," Haven addresses his daughter while she is still in the womb, as her mother sings at her family's home:

Only one young uncle falls asleep,
his face gone purple with grief and baijiu,

his one son lost shoveling coal
at the Beijing Duck Hotel,
then biking home, after dark, past

Tiananmen, June 4th.
Anniversary of absences,
song of a night to be sad.

Someone recalls, now, on his birthday,
in prison, your mother's father was given
one boiled goose egg.

[...]

[T]he moon refuses to show,
masked in clouds and the earth's shadow,
its power magnified behind a shroud.

Begonias of violence, man-powered stars
burst their last cartwheels
in a long rumor of dawn.

This is not a situation that begets certainty, and it is only within his experience of a conflicted world, in which he must ultimately admit ignorance, that any certainty arises. Here is the birth of his son (Haven's biographical statement says that he lives with his wife "and their many children"), a moment of revelation--but one which depends on accepting ignorance:

we knew right then just what we were,
knew it was religion,
its work, its aspiration,
the body broken, breaking,
the blood poured out, eternity itself--

or something like it--
glinting in and out of view
in the double black-brown crystal,
the deep translucence
of a one-day old.

This is one of the purest moments of awe in the collection, and awe is only possible when revelation is offered to one who waits in an attitude of humility and ignorance.

The collection moves through three additional sections, each, like the first, containing nine poems--a formal parallel to Beijing's Temple of Heaven, described in the first section as "a times table," the floor of each level being made up of slabs in multiples of nine. Haven also flexes his formal muscle with a few poems in received form: a sestina, a couple poems in blank verse, and a villanelle. Haven moves seamlessly into and out of traditional form, and indeed, the sestina is one of the finest poems in the collection--a young boy's account of a Catholic bishop's three-day stay at his house during a snowstorm. The poem starts with a somewhat trepidatious tone, but then the bishop begins to seem like part of the household:

...something uncommon was in our home,
where we dealt the Queen of Spades, dark cousin of the snow,
the Bishop in my father's robe, his new maroon pontificals.
We hoped it would snow and snow, that he wouldn't go away.

A sestina requires the repetition of the end-words of each line in each stanza, but in a masterstroke of craftsmanship, Haven drops the word "pontificals" from the next, penultimate stanza (substituting "ponderous, fickle," no less!), because for the boy, the bishop is no longer a symbol of the church, but an actual person. The word "pontificals" returns in the final stanza, but only as "the shock of his pontificals" in the snow as he leaves the house--a shock not only because of color, but because the man has been dissociated from his church office in the boy's mind. This poem wonderfully describes a child's process of unlearning, of entering a state of blessed ignorance that allows him to see the Bishop as a person for the first time. Here, as throughout Haven's collection, we see the paradox of ignorance serving as a vital kind of knowledge.

The book's title comes from a wonderful poem, "Summer in a Large House," from the last section. Here, a woman who thinks she hears ghosts at night is comforted by her husband:

he held her when she asked, pressed into her
the rote illusion of some distant mass,
the only prayer he knew, of love and dust
and bread, and she recited it after him
though neither one could say to what or whom.
And still it pulled, born of one breath
that bent above them the cypress's silhouette
and drifting, drifting, unseen everywhere,
pitched forever, it seemed to them forever,
dark and near in the warped old eaves of the ear.

It is in the state of uncertainty, both acknowledged and confessed ("he held her when she asked"), that what might be called awe is possible--awe at finding oneself a part of something incomprehensible, unfathomable, about which one must admit ignorance, and awe at finding oneself with one--ultimately, with many--who are capable of sharing both the ignorance and the awe. Dust and Bread is clear evidence that Haven is learned in the ways of ignorance, and that ignorance itself has taught him an abundance of beautiful things, not the least of which being a receptivity to revelation and the awe that can attend it.