TIME'S BODY

I was first introduced to Dabney Stuart's work through Gary Entsminger, publisher of Pinyon Publishing, an independent press in Montrose, Colorado, and was impressed by Stuart's metaphysical musings in Greenbrier Forest, which I reviewed in 2012. His new book, Time's Body, a collection of new and selected poems, 1994-2014, is the work of a mature voice, resonating with both eloquence and humor. It is a voice filled with formal seriousness and unhurried playfulness, not wholly committed to the canons of intellectualism or confessionalism—the voice of an aging troubadour who quotes Andre' Viette in the preliminary pages of the book: "Nothing's going to grow if it's not there."

Everything is here in this multi-layered collection—from spare poems in the Chinese tradition to longer ruminations about characters like William Shakespeare and about controvertible black holes in the universe. The book's stark cover, a photograph of an annular solar eclipse by Stan Honda, could imply a certain darkness within the pages, but contrarily, Time's Body is dazzling with sensual dramas, encounters with the natural world, and lyrics about lightness and energy.

As a former clarinetist, I'm partial to woodwinds, and the poem that exemplified that sense of control needed to play music or write enduring poetry is that of "Solo," one of Stuart's newer poems. The description of an oboe player's effect on the listener is masterful, a beautiful solo in itself...

"Her music, /sinuous as swallow flight, /emptied the mind, too. /Nothing became/the way it floated, its local air, swallowed by nothing./She followed a trail of notes,/but her listeners/went off into myriad lost/meanders, keeping/almost no time. They knew/nothing, did not think/about form and void, /or anything/on the face of the earth/or moving upon its waters. /Instead they took heart/from this wind blowing them away." 

You can almost see the black notes rising in this acknowledgement of the musician playing a wind instrument and giving lift to the listener. 

In "Yucca Mountain," readers hear the echoes of a metaphysician as Stuart describes the mountain over Ghost Dance Fault and the ghosts that haunt the fault, "vibrations... crazing the music to which their bodies ribboned." Unfettered by sentimentalism, Stuart speaks of giving his father away to open mesas and leaving echoes behind, assuring the reader that 

"...if you go there/you can breathe them. Our heels click a joy/together. Our motions give a pattern/to their air anyone can join, /invisible leaves from a notebook flying, /ghosting our dance, feathering its voices."

This is a buoyant aria linking myth and the poet's memory in a spiritual refrain.

Stuart contributes a bit of sensual whimsicality in "Staying in Touch," a poem about falling in love with the same woman living "in the blind/hole at the center/of my left eye," who gives him the "big ecstasy" of lovemaking. It is told with the wryness of a poet who recognizes the body's limitations and describes the aftermath of coming together as "...beached walruses /drifting..."  

Time's Body is a collection of poems that helps readers accept the temporal state of the human condition, to see both the here and now while probing the light beyond. It is somber, meditative, and forthright about the terrors and the consolations of life in "time's body."

Dabney Stuart has published eighteen previous volumes of poetry, is a former resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, has held a Virginia Artists Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, he was awarded the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize. His work is housed in the audio and video archives at the Library of Congress. He lives with wife Sandra in Lexington, Virginia.

Time's Body is available from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.  

RETURN TO SEWANEE

On our return to The Mountain, our first glimpse of the yard at Sewanee revealed yellow and white daffodils nodding in the sun. When we walked around the side yard, we discovered scattered clumps of wild violets surrounded by an accumulation of leaves heaped there by winter winds. Spring is trying to emerge, but the woods in front of the house are still bare, and none of the trees have begun to green. Inside the cottage, we found ladybugs swarming, hunting for warm shelter. We must have vacuumed up a few hundred of these unwanted visitors who sneaked in while we were in Louisiana, many of them clinging to the ceiling in a bedroom.

Strange how many articles about killing wild violets appear in gardening columns—these reports about ridding yards of spring's loveliest flower seem outrageous to me. But entries about sod cutters and chemical weed killers (I didn't know the wild violet belonged to the family of weeds!) abound—and they're such bad press for the beautiful flower that attracts butterflies and is even an edible plant. The wild violet also contains salicylic acid, which can be used to soften tough skin, and to treat corns and warts.

No less attractive is the yellow daffodil that surrounds a bird bath in the front yard, a bright flower that can also be found in orange, pink, red, and, more recently, lavender hues. Although, the golden daffodil has been immortalized in Wordsworth's poem of that name, and the Chinese have adopted it as a symbol of their New Year, its beauty is deceptive for it contains an alkaloid poison called lycorine which, when ingested, can cause bodily harm. Also, I'm careful when I cut these bright flowers to bring indoors because the plant has been known to cause daffodil itch on the hands.

Actually, as we drove in yesterday, the first glimpse of our Sewanee property was at the entry to our

drive and included the view of a skeleton of apartments being constructed for students at the University of the South. The huge building overshadows our retreat, but we're fortunate to have a privacy fence around the back and one side of our property. The sight of this structure isn't a surprise as we received word, months ago, that the building would be constructed while we sojourned in Louisiana. However, we're still shocked when we look out the kitchen window and see this building rising a little higher in the sky each morning. The construction reminds me of e. e. cummings' succinct poem, "Pity this busy monster, manunkind," in which he writes: "Progress is a comfortable disease...plays with the bigness of his (mankind's) littleness...

I can always sit on the front porch of our retreat, look out at the emerging daffodils, and wait for the wildlife to appear in the woods. My contemplative hour will probably include pondering the words of another poet, Robert Frost, who reminds me that "good fences make good neighbors."

P.S.  Just to warn us that spring is not ready to spring, snow flurries have begun to veil the high rise construction, and the weatherman says that temps will dip to 21 degrees tonight.  While shopping for groceries, we saw three friends who teased us about our lack of timing in returning to The Mountain while a freakish winter wind is still blowing out of the North.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

SPRINGING FORWARD

We always leave New Iberia, Louisiana in the spring when Teche country is at its most lush. Sunday morning, we're bound for The Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee where the weather forecasters report that there'll be several nights in the low 20's yet to come. I look out at the Japanese magnolia putting out deep lavender blooms and wish that I could take the entire tree with me. A few days ago I featured this lovely tree in the last poem of a new book I've written entitled Departures. Departures is a book I hadn't planned to write this winter while still in south Louisiana but was inspired to complete through corresponding with Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate who's working on a new chapbook about a famous Cajun country musician.

Darrell has inspired and influenced my writing since the day I walked into a Creative Writing class at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette twenty-five years ago. He has a generous spirit and always finds something "precious" in the expressions of poets he mentors, and when he critiques your work, you find that the gentle shifts he suggests for certain lines of the poems only make you feel as though you're discovering how to develop the confidence needed to help you spring forward.

Several months ago, Darrell gifted me with the one book of his poetry that I didn't have on my shelves, an earlier work entitled Burnt Water Suite, published in 1999. To me, this book shows the full range of his poetic abilities and honors his appreciation for places further afield than his native south Louisiana—Sarajevo, Russia, France...I'm always impressed by Darrell's cosmopolitan views. He knows as much about music, art, and philosophy as he does about poetry—a visit to his home in Churchpoint, Louisiana is like a tour of an art gallery, and he says modestly that had he not become a poet, he'd have taught art history. He also speaks with easy familiarity about Bach and Mozart, and about the music compositions of Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Part, two composers I had to research when he mentioned them to me!

In the endnotes to Burnt Water Suite, Darrell explains that the "burnt water" in his title is: 

"a reference to the opposition that engenders all creation and to the created thing itself. It is at once both the phenomenal and the pervasive Urge that creates all being. It is then flower, sex, poem, person as well as the necessitating force or desire that resides in all matter...cities and civilizations are founded on an image: the union of opposites, water and fire, and was the metaphor for the foundation of the city of Mexico..." 

This is a difficult passage, perhaps, but it explains the metaphysical inclinations of Darrell's work.

I've always loved Darrell's "odes" to his mother, and in "My Mother's Foot," he is at his lyrical best, particularly in the lines: 

"I am trying to say beloved/I am trying to keep the baskets from spilling... I am calling blessed the arc of blood/I am saying this story is not about to end." 

Readers may be moved to say, "And I hope your stories never end," for these elegies are as transporting as the sacred music he appreciates.

Darrell once dubbed me a metaphysician, but he's the poet whose metaphysical gifts are represented in "Night Prayer On Returning from Tuscany:" 

"O sweet little room flanked by others/ just like it where my friends lie/like elder monks drifting to another world/on day thoughts/-the problems and the progress of the acolytes, /-the weeds in the herb garden, /...where next year's lavender seeds will come from..."

I read this praiseworthy book again and again, and it speaks to my condition, as the Quakers say. Darrell's communications to fellow poets and sharing of his work are salutes to the spirit of art and play impulse within all of us. He's a writer who knows every word matters when you engage with other poets and writers...and what you say to the world should be true but uplifting. This outstanding south Louisiana poet is one of the major personas I will miss as I move forward to another sojourn on The Mountain.