The Last Sacred Place in North America by Stephen Haven
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this thoughtful book of poems, Stephen Haven explores what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century. Although we live in the space age, dominated by globalism, media, and technology, we have lost almost all sense of the sacred.

And yet, as Haven shows, we are still human beings. We are creatures who feel, who love, who grieve, and who remember. Haven demonstrates that even if modern man has lost his faith, he can’t get away from his humanity.

Some of Haven’s most poignant poems deal with the death of his father, an Anglican priest.

"I wanted to stay
A long while in the brake lights’ glow
But somewhere in an absence
Of underwriters and sacraments
One last time my father put on his stole.

Too young to receive
A child bared his head.
Then all the universe weighed in
For the altered touch of the priest."

My favorite poem in this book is “Last Light,” a poem based on George Inness’s painting Summer Landscape, 1894. Haven captures a sense of the simplicity of life in the late nineteenth century, before the World Wars, before the space age. And in this poem, Haven shows a longing for a paradisal world that he believes will never be here. The lines are beautiful and sad:

"Everything’s smeared with this one view: early September,
Late afternoon, the magenta of Man at home in his world.
Cattle fade in the gloam, no wild ass of a man, no hand ever
Raised against them. The peace that passes understanding
Throttles in a songbird’s throat. Toward the further horizon,
Three chords of color lighten finally to the speckled blue
And white of sky: dark bottom band, then blue-green grass,
Then the far field, distant trees, ceding to autumn and its tones.

. . .

No sign of rain, though still in the dark swath something takes
To ground, the black tilt of the mind, this rogue lush calm
Cohering, collapsing, imagined into being, till we know
That this is in us, necessary, superfluous, bearing through some
Wild dream, the Garden as it never was, and never again will be."




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