The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks

Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven’s first collection of poems is many things: an ethnographic tour of his hometown in upstate New York; the story of his early life as a minister’s son; and a reflection on the New England heritage of Puritanism, both so near and so far away. In its totality, the book offers a tribute to the many small moments that weave together to form our personal histories.

“Haven’s book of poetry is thick with place. He works from the landscape of his ancestors, who landed on Cape Cod in the 1600s, and the landscape of his boyhood, spent in the dying mill towns of New York’s Mohawk Valley. His language is agile and moodily elegant, but this lyricism belies the emotional desolation of his subjects. A fight between brothers, the inscrutability of a river, a girl’s premature motherhood—he handles these scenes without sentimentality, and still they speak of ruin.”—Charlene Dy, Amherst Magazine

Alone, tonight, in Amsterdam, NY,
I walk past your old haunts: this shop, that yard.
You’re gone. You’ve left your morning wait behind
stacked pallets, where day-shift buzzers drill
the air, sing for measured lengths of wood,
of time, and thoughts of adolescent wives.
The dust from those worn saws will always float
across your corneas. I picked that scab too.
But yesterday, before you left, we rode
Suzukis through the Adirondack foothills.
Along those paths, our tires bit the green
of aging mountains breaking through the rock.

             —from “For My Brother’s Decision to Join the Navy”

6 x 9 inches • 80 pages • ISBN 0-9705344-9-3 • $11.95