Long Gone: Poems

Vibrant, challenging and richly textured, Stuart's collection (after Second Sight and Light Years) ranges over such topics as love, history, family relations and the poet's travels in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Language and its power is a constant concern of these nimble poems. ""Bedtime Story"" ends with ""the language/ of the future reciting itself,"" while in ""New Zealand"" Stuart wonders ""if I take her/ into my self, swallow her whole,/ will I feel her languages/ humming under my skull,/ coming out of my mouth?"" Stuart is especially concerned with the power of language to create both reality and fantasy. His poems often fuse the two opposites, creating a kind of mythological realism, or veer between them in surprising ways. ""Appetites: Variations"" begins: ""My mother is full/ of fire again. One eye/ throws flames across the room,/ while the other sizzles/ like grease in a frying pan."" Admitting that ""I, who have longed to be/ both, find myself/ neither,"" Stuart reconciles his opposites in the marvelous ""Janus,"" in which the many-faced god says: ""Whoever looks at my faces in a good light/ will recognize both of them are content/ to be each other."" (Nov.)