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Ladder of Hours
“Keith Althaus has the kind of straightforward voice that commands He makes a series of seemingly calm statements and wham!, you're hit by the fact that he's telling the truth, the beautiful truth of what it's like to be alive right now.”—Alan Dugan
Keith Althaus published his first book (Rival Heavens, Provincetown Arts Press) in 1993 and has been working in relative obscurity ever since. Ladder of Hours gathers poems written over four decades, a selection that teaches us how insight into everyday life can transform the world. Composed in language that is spare, almost skeletal, yet lacking nothing, Ladder of Hours investigates the subtleties of moments we might otherwise overlook. Althaus is interested in everything, from the label on a whiskey bottle to the distance between emotion and idea. His poems explode “ordinary” moments of perception, revealing unexpected meaning and resonance, and they do so in a way that seems strangely without ego, bent entirely on extracting and capturing the essence of his discoveries. Ladder of Hours takes us into numinous territory we didn't know was there.
Lullaby
The painful series
of operation that
culminate in
becoming forty, eighty,
neither one. Dying young
or old, awake or drugged,
or pleasantly unaware
in sleep as they say Auden
wanted to and did, with just
the slightest sensation,
like a sleeping baby
handed from one pair of arms
into another.
Keith Althaus has published poems in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and numerous other magazines. He has worked at many jobs, including carpentry, tree planting, loft renovation, and clerical work, and now runs a gallery with his wife, the artist Susan Baker. They live in North Truro, Massachusetts.
Keith Althaus published his first book (Rival Heavens, Provincetown Arts Press) in 1993 and has been working in relative obscurity ever since. Ladder of Hours gathers poems written over four decades, a selection that teaches us how insight into everyday life can transform the world. Composed in language that is spare, almost skeletal, yet lacking nothing, Ladder of Hours investigates the subtleties of moments we might otherwise overlook. Althaus is interested in everything, from the label on a whiskey bottle to the distance between emotion and idea. His poems explode “ordinary” moments of perception, revealing unexpected meaning and resonance, and they do so in a way that seems strangely without ego, bent entirely on extracting and capturing the essence of his discoveries. Ladder of Hours takes us into numinous territory we didn't know was there.
Lullaby
The painful series
of operation that
culminate in
becoming forty, eighty,
neither one. Dying young
or old, awake or drugged,
or pleasantly unaware
in sleep as they say Auden
wanted to and did, with just
the slightest sensation,
like a sleeping baby
handed from one pair of arms
into another.
Keith Althaus has published poems in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and numerous other magazines. He has worked at many jobs, including carpentry, tree planting, loft renovation, and clerical work, and now runs a gallery with his wife, the artist Susan Baker. They live in North Truro, Massachusetts.
- GenresPoetry
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 8, 2024
Althaus for Massachusetts Poet Laureate! I read the state doesn't have one, and Althaus seems to have already taken many honors as a worthy candidate. I vote for him.
I rarely find a poetry book that speaks to me, a poet with a certain eye who really noticeş, who pays attention and has a turn of thought that makes me smile and read the poem again. It is quite possible I should read more poetry to leaven my joy, but this also depends on my quietness, which doesn't happen every day. Althaus came to me out of the blue as a gift, and made me realize again what I was missing.
In Ladder of Hours, Althaus covers so much territory--places he's been, ways he felt, even while sitting in a snow storm at his house in Truro. I have many folded-down pages in this book, with no easy way to critique. I will just share one of my easy findings:
May 19,2003
One day no one
reading this date
will have lived then:
this morning when
the cherry is in bloom
and the dog lounges
by the door not anxious
to come in, and bees
bounce limb to limb,
and an oriole visits
from the long cloudless blue
that stands behind, above it all.
Explanation is unnecessary,
just someone to describe
its routine beauty,
the ordinary day, nothing special,
one of many, exceptional only
as the breath you catch again
having lost it.
I rarely find a poetry book that speaks to me, a poet with a certain eye who really noticeş, who pays attention and has a turn of thought that makes me smile and read the poem again. It is quite possible I should read more poetry to leaven my joy, but this also depends on my quietness, which doesn't happen every day. Althaus came to me out of the blue as a gift, and made me realize again what I was missing.
In Ladder of Hours, Althaus covers so much territory--places he's been, ways he felt, even while sitting in a snow storm at his house in Truro. I have many folded-down pages in this book, with no easy way to critique. I will just share one of my easy findings:
May 19,2003
One day no one
reading this date
will have lived then:
this morning when
the cherry is in bloom
and the dog lounges
by the door not anxious
to come in, and bees
bounce limb to limb,
and an oriole visits
from the long cloudless blue
that stands behind, above it all.
Explanation is unnecessary,
just someone to describe
its routine beauty,
the ordinary day, nothing special,
one of many, exceptional only
as the breath you catch again
having lost it.
July 11, 2007
"Little Elegy" is one of my favorite short poems.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews