Sunlight & Cedar

In Sunlight and Cedar, the themes of Ken Hada’s poetry remain constant to his earlier work. You will find poems of nature, ecology, family, isolation and social justice, with a little moral theology and philosophy thrown in. But what has changed in this collection is Hada’s tone. It’s a subtle change, but what one finds in this collection is a wiser and older poet who has begun to come to terms with life’s disappointments, and thus you meet a poet who can revel evermore deeply in life’s joys, however fleeting and few they are. This turn in the poet’s mindset is signaled from the get-go with his masterful title poem Sunlight and Cedar in which he answers an apparent shortcoming of his work, it’s preoccupation with cigars, sunlight and cedar, by asking, “Is it such a bad thing / to want to endure as cedar? / Is it a shortcoming? / to seek the light of the sun?” Clearly it is not, nor is it a bad thing to play dominoes with your dad, or to go camping with your son, or any of the scenes explored in these poems. So settle in for an evening or two with this fine collection of poems and enjoy the works of a master poet as he tries to remember something beyond words. -Alan Berecka