"Something About the Stars"
from Keith Althaus's
Ladder of Hours:
Poems 1969-2005

Keith Althaus:

Keith Althaus is the author of Rival Heavens (1993, Provincetown Arts Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, and numerous other magazines and journals. He has worked at many jobs, including loft renovation, tree planting, and clerical work, and now runs a gallery with his wife, the painter Susan Baker. They live in North Truro, Massachusetts. (Photo by Susan Baker)

About Ladder of Hours: Poems 1969-2005:

“The grave, conversational poems of Keith Althaus are philosophical in spirit, because they persistently inquire after what a person can know. What is most striking about this poetry is the ongoing steadiness of the speaker’s attention as it attempts to make out the facts – the muteness of the physical world, the painful separateness of consciousness, our ignorance of any design – but there is something so passionate and un-self-involved in these monologues that the reader feels the weight of the unknown surrounding us, and shares in the curious dignity of pressing forward. This is late night talk radio for philosophy majors, broadcast from the deep middle of life. Only if you combined Robert Creeley with Jean Follain, you might get a poetry as spare yet rich as this. Ladder of Hours is an austerely beautiful book, one with visionary resonances and a very particular poetic elegance.”
— Tony Hoagland

Keith Althaus on Ladder of Hours:

“I began to write in the simplest and most straightforward language because I thought it would be easy. And because I had no audience, any attempt to impress or seduce the reader with rhetoric would only come back to me. Years later, by the time I realized how difficult it is to write simply, I was hooked on the promise of its reward.

“While technically these poems cover many years, more than half my life, it is in fact no time: the pleasures and sorrows that preoccupied me when I began have not gone away, but have grown clearer, sharper, more insistent upon being heard. And the mysteries I set out to explore have, as mysteries do, only deepened and widened. I stand no nearer conclusion now than I did then, yet, as if in compensation, writing has given me a second, concurrent life, more like a companion than a shadow.

“A poet can only hope his wild stabs occasionally strike bone, a startling occurrence for both the reader and writer. It’s fitting for an art born of solitude that we share these moments alone.”

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