Columbarium (Phoenix Poets)

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.

I THE ELEMENTS

Sung from the generation of AIR

Drawn from the generation of FIRE

II SHADOW GEORGICS

Apple

Bees

Braid

Cross/X

Dark the star

Forms of Forts

Let me tell you about my marvellous god

Two Brief Views of Hell

shadow/ Isaiah

Jump

Kingfisher Carol

Lightning

shadow/ Lintel

What You Said about the Moon

Night Songs

Now in the minute

O

Pear

The History of Quiver

Rewind

The Rose

Scarecrow

The Seasons

shadow/ Shadow

From "Lessons from Television"

These Trees in Particular

Unless and Until

Lost Rules of Usage

Vigil

Weather

Wings

X/Cross

To You and For You

Zero

III THE ELEMENTS

Wrought from the