Columbarium (Phoenix Poets Series)
- Book Review,
by Susan Stewart
From Publishers Weekly
Poet-critic and MacArthur fellow Stewart's (On Longing) fourth book of verse contains two pairs of long poems on the elements-"Sung from the generation of AIR" and "Drawn from the generation of FIRE" at the book's beginning and "Wrought from the generation of EARTH" and "Flown from the generation of WATER" at its close. They surround a long middle section of "shadow georgics" organized alphabetically by title: "Apples," "Bees," "Braid," "Cross/ X," "Dark the Star," down through "X/ Cross," "To You and for You" and "Zero." This clever, embedded patterning suggests that the alphabet and language are akin to nature's elements, elements that the poet gathers and disperses into a variety of visually divergent forms, enacting the perpetual mutability of nature. In "Braid," for instance, Stewart moves from a painstaking description of fingers and hair to the telling, if somewhat heavy-handed announcement: "You can tell a story/ many ways. You can leave/ something out or put// something in; you can fool/ yourself and hide./ You can shake out// the form or try/ to manage every wisp,/ but the latter will// only bring you pain." Throughout the collection, the poet delves into human universals (memory, breath, voice, whisper, loneliness, etc.) while constantly attentive to etymology and word choice, and she makes scholarly reference to scores of classical and Biblical figures including Virgil, Hecuba, Peleus, Isaiah, Lot and Lazarus. But as in previous work, it is moments of brief and simple aphorism ("Build fires to worship the wood, burn wood to worship the fire") that forcefully summarize the book's project. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In her wonderfully imaginative fourth poetry book, Columbarium, Susan Stewart invents a type of poem she calls "shadow georgics." These poems respond to and reconfigure the traditional georgic, a didactic poem about rural life. The georgic goes back as far as Hesiod's Works and Days (8th century B.C.), and reaches its high water mark in Virgil's Georgics (37-30 B.C.), a sequence of four books that evokes the delights and dangers of country life. Stewart sometimes paraphrases and often calls to mind Virgil's discursive treatise, which is at once a practical guide and a celebration of the hard labor demanded by the Earth. It serves as a weathervane for her highly constructed work. I appreciate the instructive short lyric that inaugurates Stewart's intricately braided sequence. It has the deceptive simplicity of a Frostian parable, a made thing.I had a little dove made of paper and string.I pulled him along behind me -- he could not sing.He was a made thing.I made him by heart.He did not sing at all and that was all of his art.Stewart's "shadow georgics" are organized alphabetically by title: "Apple," "Bees," "Braid," "Cross/X," "Dark the star" and so forth onto "Weather," "Wings," "X/Cross," "To You and For You" and "Zero." The format suggests a parallel between language and nature, the alphabet and the elements. The carpentry is extensive; each of the poems takes a radically different form, and no two are alike. It's as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms. Stewart's difficult instruction manual is shadowed by doubts, haunted by childhood memories, night fears. The poet thinks hard about natural processes ("Born with the elm, you will die with it") and human history ("History starts/ with the theft of a cow/ and ends with the theft/ of a temple"). Her poems are investigations ("You understand these are questions you are asking of yourself," she writes) and represent the dark unconscious of the georgic type, since they bring up what the didactic or all-knowing consciousness tends to repress: death itself. The speaker in this book is a brooder, mindful of absence, attentive to consciousness and watchfully peering into the future, as in "Vigil": "Midnight much worry/ in a little room -- / strike a match and time/ is burning toward you." Stewart takes time in these poems to think about time. She thrills to nature and considers how we use it to make meaning. No subject is more fitting for the georgic than the cycle of the seasons, and here is Stewart's startling contribution. The death of the shepherd, like the poem itself, refers to James Thompson's The Seasons (1730).The SeasonsIce-jammed hard-clasped branches in the blocks a whole river of them yet at the same time, the time sensed beneath the time walked, the time breathing in and out, the water almost eddying, still pushing there beneath the milk-white surface, deep down and over the bed of rocks; you could call them frozen, though they never live another state than less and less until they're gone, the water going on and on until it all accrues again. The seasons always seemed to be a form of freedom, something good for making meaning, the kind of notion a founding father could pull out now and then whenever the now and then would flag. Time healing time, you know the saw. Lightning strikes and struck. The shepherd fell down dead. And then it all wound up again: a redbreast made a ruckus, the quick eternal sprung. You wanted summer or you wanted death. So death came again, and that was autumn.By Edward Hirsch Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Book Description
Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of poetry.
In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.
Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.
Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.
From the Inside Flap
Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of poetry.
In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.
Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.
Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.
About the Author
Susan Stewart is a professor of English at Princeton University and a former MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently The Forest, published by the University of Chicago Press and winner of the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum for 1995. She has also written several books of literary and art criticism, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism and is also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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