There are only two moments each year when you can stand under the sun and cast no shadow—two moments when the lamp of heaven is poised directly over the pointy top of your noggin. Each one is a “Lahaina Noon.”
Each one is a moment of pure up-and-down relationship to the cosmos, a moment of vertical presence, a fixed moment that gets deeper, richer, higher the longer you have the strength to stand in that unmoving spot.
Of course, most of us are too busy with horizontal activity to notice the Lahaina Noon. We live in a society that always rushes ahead—contra-flow coning, drive-thru burger lines, Costco checkout lanes, baggage claim conveyor belts and calendars with paydays marked in red. So thank God for a poet like Eric Paul Shaffer, whose job is to grab these vertical moments and give them as gifts to the forward-churning world.
Shaffer’s new book Lahaina Noon, debuting at Borders Books & Music in Kahului on April 15, gives us a whole slew of these vertical moments, each one as clear and as rich as a sunrise.
Eric Paul Shaffer is an unusual phenomenon: a Maui poet. In American letters, the proper way to gain credentials as a poet is to publish widely in literary reviews, produce collections that draw critical acclaim, live like a happy monk and spend a lifetime capturing “Lahaina Noons.” Eric has those bona fide credentials.
He has published in American Scholar, Chicago Review, Pearl, Ploughshares and North American Review, among many other respected quarterlies. He has written four previous books of verse, including Portable Planet and Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen (published, as is Lahaina Noon, by Leaping Dog Press). He has won two prestigious literary awards—the 2000 Potent Prose Ax Prize for Poetry and the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature (the top prize in Hawai‘i).
I don’t know of anyone else who has achieved that kind of literary reputation while writing on, about and for the island of Maui.
Eric will be at Border’s to share coffee and cake and readings from his new book. With him will be his friend and publisher, California poet Jordan Jones, who will add some readings from his own new collection called The Wheel.
For us Maui people, what’s so great about this new book is that the entire collection is rooted here, in the landscape that we alone know so intimately. Although Eric’s sights are set on the broadest literary horizons, his book is a gift particular to this place.
We know the place: Haleakala in starlight while driving mauka on ‘Oma‘opio Road; the Crater floor bathed in silver moonlight; an old missionary church near roaring surf; whales at sunset; a derelict bus abandoned in Pulehu Gulch. In “Kula Gold,” he describes this scene: