Books by Ken Hada

"Ken Hada's Not Quite Pilgrims presents a natural world brimming with promise: there are owls in the trees, trout in the rivers, and wild geese in "feral skies"; there is a "chestnut mare" leaning over the fence that contains her; there is the weighted and meaningful "stillness of stars." In such a place, the shimmering fish pulled briefly from its cool stream into the bright air serves as confirmation that the humble fisherman belongs, and that we are all given "a moment's chance to hold beauty." Though there are shadows in these poems--the shadows of humankind's hate and destruction, and the shadow of death--the work itself is "undeterred in darkness," and the light breaks through. It is in the appreciation of simple wonders often taken for granted--birdsong, music, rain, morning coffee, trees, the sky--that "truth begins," and we can start to find our redemption." -Chera Hammons, author of The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City

With none of the cloying sentimentality of some so-called "nature poets," Hada writes of the natural world as we actually experience it. Few poets since Robert Frost have spoken as clearly and movingly about our attraction to and alienation from the natural world that surrounds us even when we can't be said to be fully in it. In these poems, the speaker is both the man standing on his stoop "looking up at stars" as "tree frogs chortle" and the man who hears the birds more distantly now as he walks tiredly back down the road he has helped to clear and to pave. In the haunting, "Two Deer at Twilight," it is the total otherness of the natural world, its inaccessibility to us that makes the poet love it all the more, as if he were a troubadour and nature his cruel mistress. In "Redbirds Balancing on a Cedar Limb" the poet freely admits that "Their song / is a temporary fix, something / to keep other things away." "I am glad he doesn't trust me," he says, in another poem, of the Roadrunner he has frightened from his back door. Again and again Hada finds poignancy in our strained but indispensable relationship with the natural world. This is the book of poems to tuck into your rucksack before heading into the woods, the book to read on your porch on a clear fall evening as the lights dim around you. This is also the book to carry with you on the bus, train, or taxi into the heart of the busy city, where you just might need it the most. -Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma State Poet Laureate 2015-2016