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

Persimmon Sunday

Literature & Fiction

Hada, Ken

Poetry

purple flag

From the prologue through the shaped memories and imaginings of boyhood to the affirmations of the "dignity of work" of ordinary men and women in the heartland, Ken Hada's new collection tells the truth. There is a profound authenticity of voice in these pages, an honesty of character, a wonderful sense of place and time, all underlined by both a lyrical joy and a kind of boisterous sadness for things and people seen and recalled in bars and cafes and the long stretches of land "on the edge/of small town America/in the heart of God's country." Hada sings and celebrates and despairs in the tradition of Steinbeck and Guthrie, and he examines the personal and cultural landscapes where "the ghost/of democracy drifts" as working people try to make lives for themselves and their families, to find that often elusive place where "happiness comes and peace may be found." Writer, seer, observer, and essential character in these poems, "recording impressions, taking note/of my own mortality," Hada tells us with a deeply felt and engaging clarity about those lives, reminding us that they are "more than metaphor" and that the currents of social and economic change affect real people and not just caricatures in the culture wars that divide us. He has "good memories of an Ozark childhood," and knows that too many of those he grew up with have been left behind by those changes. But he also knows that "the same stars hang above us all." That is the fundamental truth in these remarkable poems, genuine and insightful, that at every turn of the page bring us to smiling recognition or to tears. Hada knows that we all share this great land together and that all of us must accept that the commitment to shared purpose and community - across the many horizons at the nation's great core and both eastward and westward to the oceans that frame us - are what "keep an unfair/world from grinding to a halt." This is a brilliant book, a literary and cultural treasure. - Jonas Zdanys

Bring an Extry Mule

Winner of the 2010 National Western Heritage Award, these poems, acting as spare parts in themselves, go into the making of one smooth-running, powerful engine. --Diane Glancy, author of Pushing the Bear

Spare Parts

Mongrel Empire Press

Review Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2007-2011, writes, "The poems in Ken Hada's Contour Feathers seem effortless, but they are effortless in the way a lilac flowering is effortless, or goodness in John Lewis is effortless, or the way the work of a nuthatch is effortless. Grounded in vision and rooted in the mystical, Hada's works are translations of the miraculous all around us. I find myself here in the company of Rilke, Basho, Clifton, Rumi. "Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan, writes, "Ken Hada's deeply wondrous collection of poems Contour Feathers is a practice in worship filled with luminous heart questioning, 'humble boyhood wonder, ' and at times the somber reflection of a man searching within himself to find his own truth, and the truths of the greater world. 'Like the constant glow of a moon forever silent all around us, ' Hada's poems are persistent, are eternal in their longing, and in their ache. He speaks like a brother of the woods, an Ozark, prairie mystic who prophets that mysticism is 'a phenomenon that invokes enchantment, pure in its simple complexity, who wants the honest beauty of the natural world to quell his inner waves, and soothe pandemic, political, and pseudo-religious frustrations; 'their piety - false as ditch water floating with cow shit after rain.' Ken's mellow true voice echoes through the hearts of trees and bounces off the shoulders of birds. Contour Feathers made me feel 'at home with the planet, at home with the honeybees, with the whales, the songbirds...the moon and the stars, the dust, to which we all return.'" About the Author Much of Ken Hada's poetry is formed on his back deck in rural Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma. His work has been awarded by The Western Writers of America, The National Western Heritage Museum, SCMLA and The Oklahoma Center for the Book. He has also been featured on The Writer's Almanac and other digital formats. Ken directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. He enjoys traveling to meet with folks, give public readings and workshops. Contact and other information is available at: www.kenhada.org.

Contour Feathers

Turning Plow Press

Feral Skies: Selected Poems

Cyberwit.net