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 Leaping Dog Press is proud to announce that Lāhaina Noon by Eric Paul Shaffer has received the Award of Excellence for "Aloha from Beyond Hawaiʻi" from the Hawaiʻi Book Publishers Association in the 2006 Ka Palapala Poʻokela Book Awards.
Read more at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser.
Lāhaina Noon is the moment when tropical sun shines straight down. No shadows darken that astonishing moment of illumination, and Hawaiʻi is where it happens. Lāhaina Noon, Eric Paul Shaffer's fifth book, contains poems of Maui that reveal a clarity and sense of place as deep as lines of Billy Collins, profound as Gary Snyder, and direct as Jim Harrison.
(Download the free Acrobat Reader.)
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 Eric Paul Shaffer lives in Kula, on Maui, with Veronica and Harlequin on the sunset slope of Haleakalā. He is author of four books and a chapbook of poetry, two chapbooks of fiction, and non-fiction articles and reviews. His work appears in Ploughshares, North American Review, ACM, American Scholar, Threepenny Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bakunin, Malahat Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and the anthology 100 Poets Against the War. Shaffer received the 2000 Potent Prose Ax Prize for Poetry, the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature (presented annually to an established writer in Hawai'i), a fellowship to the Summer 2006 Fishtrap Writers Retreat and Workshop, and the 2006 Rupert Hughes Writing Award (3rd place).
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- “The arrival of a new collection of Shaffer's precise, graceful, witty, luminous work makes for a happy day in the Fowler household. No one is better at peeling away a single, ordinary moment until the whole world has been revealed.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of
The Jane Austen Book Club,
Sarah Canary,
and Sister Noon - “Lāhaina Noon is not only a specific study of Maui, but a brilliant examination of a human’s place in the cosmos. Eric Paul Shaffer’s clear, sane, poems will help you understand where you are wherever you are.”
— Sara Backer, author of
American Fuji - “Eric Paul Shaffer’s poems, well-crafted and wise, don’t speak from the mind, the heart, the spirit — those are our divisions; they speak from the whole, integrated mammal he is — the sort of voice we need more of on this great Earth.”
— J. D. Whitney, author of
Grandmother Says
and Word of Mouth - “Eric Paul Shaffer, shadowless man of Lāhaina Noon — He’s in camo — You think you see him but he isn’t there — He is like earth shine on dark side of the moon — He is writing down his life as it happens — Mockingbird listening to Mozart — Tracking Big Ursa through night sky — He tells us what he saw when sky crack open like blue Easter egg — Epiphanies that comprise our daily life.”
— Albert Saijo, author of
Outspeaks: A Rhapsody
and Trip Trap (with Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch) - “Like a magic lantern, Shaffer is a bearer of light. At times his poetry becomes so incandescent it makes you just sit in wonder. The rest of the time it reveals lush landscape and uncommon wisdom. Pay attention. This is the dawning of a major talent.”
— Steven Taylor Goldsberry, author of
Luzon
and The Writer's Book of Wisdom - “In a career that has been building for two decades, Eric Paul Shaffer has managed to create an impressive, intriguing, varied, and highly accomplished body of published work. Lāhaina Noon, Shaffer's sixth collection of poetry, is a strong contender for his best book ever. Whether he is sketching the ecological metaphor of a black leopard surviving on Maui, or narrating the experience of the first human ever to see a rainbow, or dramatizing that unique celestial moment when the sun annihilates the false perspective of our shadow lives by shining straight down on our heads, Shaffer reveals to us in Lāhaina Noon not only the grace that allows us to inhabit and enjoy the natural world, but also the terrible responsibility we have not to destroy it.”
— Robert Clark Young, author of One of the Guys
- “Mynas, octopi, lovers near the dump, excuses for officers, constellations, a grave that says 'enough' — whatever Eric Paul Shaffer touches turns to kindness, wit, and understated profundity. lt's good to see the old myths off his place [Maui] gently turned on their heads for a fresh, unassuming perspective.”
— Greg Keeler, author of Epiphany at Goofy's Gas
- “Entering the 'Clear Pool School' of Poetry: Reviews of Eric Paul Shaffer's Lāhaina Noon and Jordan Jones's The Wheel”
— Kirpal Gordon, author of Eros in Sanskrit
- “Pg. 69: Eric Paul Shaffer's 'Lāhaina Noon'”
— Marshal Zeringue, Campaign for the American Reader
| | Eric Paul Shaffer is also the author of:- How I Read Gertrude Stein by Lew Welch, edited by Eric Paul Shaffer (Grey Fox, 1995)
- The Soul Unearthed: Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal Through Nature, edited by Cass Adams (J. P. Tarcher, 1996)
- Portable Planet: Poems (Leaping Dog Press, 2000)
- Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen (Leaping Dog Press, 2001)
- 100 Poets Against the War, edited by Todd Swift (Salt Publishing, 2003)
- You Are Here (Obscure Publications, 2004)
- The Felony Stick: Selections from Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era (Leaping Dog Press, 2006)
- Burn & Learn: Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era: A Novel, (Leaping Dog Press, 2009)
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