Columbarium
By Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press, 122 pages, $22.50
“On the halcyon sea,/they nest their nests/from twigs and briars/and hay” (“Kingfisher Carol”). So writes Susan Stewart, paying delicate homage to her fellow makers in “Columbarium,” her fourth book of poetry and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle award. A profoundly imagined book, this is one of the most impressive and serious volumes of poetry to come out in the past five years. This is a book worth owning and returning to over many years.
As Stewart’s epigraph from the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, a “columbarium” is a pigeon house or dovecote; it is also “a subterranean sepulcher, having in its walls niches or holes for cinerary urns.” Evoking a shelter for singing creatures and for the ashes of the dead, “Columbarium” erects a capacious house, a poetic structure open to the on-going claims of the living and the reverberations and weight of the dead. And indeed, the soul itself is a kind of columbarium, as Stewart suggests with her second epigraph, from Plato’s “Theaetetus”:
“Now let us make in each soul a sort of aviary of all kinds of birds. . . .
“[A]nd by the birds we must understand pieces of knowledge.”
Out of our difficult knowledge–of destruction, violence, corruption and decay–arises Stewart’s project of soul- and song-making, of world-witnessing. As she writes in “Bees,” closely following Virgil’s “Georgics,” the great Roman poems that take farming as their setting and subject:
That the bees were born in the corpse of the injured animal.
That the bees came forth out of the corrupted flesh.
“Columbarium” is carefully structured, beginning and ending with long, multisectioned, exploratory poems of “The Elements”–air and fire poems Stewart’s opening incantions, earth and water poems her benedictions. In between are 35 poems she calls “Shadow Georgics,” engaged as she is with the “Georgics.” Stewart has organized her “Shadow Georgics” into a kind of abecedary, poems launched in order of the letters of the alphabet, from “Apple” and “Bees” through “Pear” and “Scarecrow” to “Zero,” ranging from intricate ditties to ingenious shape-poems to expansive meditations.
Stewart is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Princeton University, as well as a poet; she has published important work on longing, visual art, nonsense, Proust, lyric, literary authenticity and modernity. (Disclosure: Stewart will be contributing an essay on poetic meters and forms to “The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry,” which James Chandler, of the University of Chicago, and I are co-editing.) “Columbarium” may be read as a companion to her latest scholarly book, “Poetry and the Fate of the Senses” (2002); these poems also explore the fate of human sentience. Stewart ranges widely, invoking many subjects: the weather, childhood toys, natural history, the news, our mortality, our kinship with other animals, our penchant for destruction, our merely historical situation versus the larger elemental forces that shape and outlast us–“sleepers drifting deep below the silt of time.”
Stewart charts a fallen world, a world vulnerable to harrowing and pocalypse: in “Drawn From the Generation of Fire,” she envisions a plowman who, “running, reached the city limits. Aflame, he fell into the river’s flame.” It is no accident that in her many poems exploring the natural world she does not write idylls or pastorals–those genres associated with aristocratic play, those delightful albeit often slumming fantasies of rural life. She has chosen instead to engage the “Georgics,” those magisterial poems about human husbandry and stewardship–about agriculture and culture.
In her exact scrutiny of the natural world and her affinity for form, she may remind some of Robert Frost. Wordsworth may also lie behind some of these poems, though they are free of what Keats called his “egotistical sublime.” This is an essential poetry, a poetry of essences and elements, coupled with an awareness of existential transience. It is at bottom a religious, meditative poetry in the line of the British romantics and Stewart’s beloved 17th Century forebears, Thomas Traherne and Richard Crashaw.
In its largest ambition, this book is a sustained meditation on forming, on poiesis (Greek for “making”). Stewart explores making in the broadest sense: everything from God’s making of the world, to birds making nests, to the varieties of human making (of art, forts, scarecrows and, of course, poems), to the human transformation of the environment in such activities as farming, foresting, building, despoiling, planting.
Several poems have an appealing, neo-Virgilian “how-to” quality; they often approximate recipes and instructions, those ways we tell others how to make things:
You can roast late apples
in the ashes. You can run
them in slices on a stick.
(“Apples”)
Do this when the west winds blow. Do this when the meadows
are alive with poppies.
(“Bees”)
Keep your myrrh in a holly cupboard,
the laurel wreath on a hook by your door.
(“These Trees in Particular”)
They even advise recycling, as part of their broader metaphysics of recycling:
make the door from the planks
of the broken table, and the table
from the planks of the broken floor.
(“These Trees in Particular”)
In interviews, Stewart has spoken of her interest in transmission–as a teacher as well as a poet and critic. The poems offer their own transmissions of a vast cultural inheritance, and they bespeak the profound gratitude of one who understands herself to be the beneficiary of such generative inheritance–from family, friends, nature, books, the living and the dead.
These poems bespeak “an obstinate/duty to pattern,” as Stewart writes in “Braid.” This duty to pattern arises from our mortal condition: Time uses us, we and our loved ones die, and well before that chaos may break upon us, and we try to give form en route:
Unbearable, the world
that broke into time.
Unbearable, the just-born
certainty of distance.
(“Apple”).
Such poems suggest a near-overcoming of an exile from Eden.
Thus we find in these poems a wealth of gardens, wheat fields, hayings, scarecrows: signs of human labor on and transformation of the land. Yet Stewart is not interested in labor per se; she is interested in work–labor versus work, a distinction beautifully elaborated in Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” (1958) and more recently in Elaine Scarry’s “Body in Pain” (1985). “Labor” suggests the alienated work-of-the-body, the extraction of human labor-power by capital, by owners, by a system of domination; “work” suggests a beneficent circuit by which expenditures of human energy produce goods (material, spiritual, artistic) for that particular human being or for her shared community. Labor is about loss, work about making. These poems station themselves somewhere between the inevitabilities of loss and the redemptive possibilities of making. As the poet writes, articulating perhaps the deepest impulse of the book: “That there should be something/where before there was nothing” (“Forms of Forts”).
One soon notices a very unusual feature of this book: While its formal range attests to a dazzling virtuosity, the poet is almost invisible as a particular ego. The poems of “The Elements” seem to come to us as if they were voiced by the elements themselves, not by some historical, embodied, limited human subject–though our limited condition as historical, mortal creatures is part of her subject. Such poems hover on the edge of incarnation, audibility, disappearance and re-birth, and the work of the poem is often to bring us over and beyond its initial limit. Thus the title of her first poem, “Sung From the Generation of Air,” pivots us over the edge from vacancy to substance:
Sung from the generation of air
or vacancy, what memory can sing
before there is memory
a breath sent into being before
a being
draws in and out
its breath.
The poems claim an Orphic power, bringing into being what they sing of. At their best, Stewart’s poems escape literariness and achieve mythic self-evidence, as if they were latter-day bulletins from Genesis or Hesiod’s “Theogony,” or from Hesiod’s poem about farming and ethics, “Works and Days.”
These poems seem to be written, then, not so much from the position of a particular “I”–with all its specific historical inflections–as from the condition of human sentience itself. That is, the poems, especially those of the elements, seem not so much authored as evoked. We are in the presence of a governing, shaping consciousness, open to the wind, to history, to natural science, to myth, to personal experience, to religious modalities, to the media that flow through the same spaces as the wind.
Throughout the book one finds neither annunciations nor evasions of self, just a cumulative sense of the poet as an acutely refining medium, a maker submerged and shadowed forth in what she makes. This is why Stewart sounds like no one else today, and why her book has the peculiar aura of feeling totally contemporary and, at the same time, ancient. She doesn’t traffic in reified personal voice, the hallmark of much contemporary lyric, though she is deeply engaged with the status of the voice–that of humans, of remote gods, of “the voice within the wind,” as she puts it, meditating on the death of Icarus. She strikes no pose, makes no witticisms, offers no chat or apercus. She also largely refrains from sententiousness and resists the oracular, pedantic posture such a project could easily have occasioned.
If this sounds like high-minded but mainly dry stuff, I’m not serving the book well. These are sensuous, sorrowful and sometimes ecstatic poems, in which an apple inspires a desire to “come back” from the dead, “just for one bite, one break,/and the cold sweet grain on the tongue”; in which the shape of beehives evokes a divine, wildly inventive presence:
Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons
of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands above the world is of his making.
If some poems enact a propulsive motion for-ward, others dwell in the exquisite hiatus, the space of lyric suspension (“Now in the minute, in the half-life when the rose/light lights the high leaves”). Here and elsewhere, Stewart offers phenomenological songs, lyrics enacting perception, which complement her ontological preoccupations, her focus on being and becoming. She incarnates these abstractions in vivid images and sound patterns: a scarecrow “bleached by weeks of sun and rain/until denim was done in, tattersall/fell into checkered tatters”; “the salamander stirs, the phoenix wings away/and ash sustains the frailest root.”
These poems are fashioned and, one might even say, old-fashioned, but they are also alive to our particular moment, when “Neon clouds fill shopping malls,” when we absorb “Lessons From Television,” when a walk down a suburban street occasions an infernal vision–a trash bag looming as, “The most oppressive thing,/the most tormenting, a black sun deflated” (“Two Brief Views of Hell”).
While this is not moralizing poetry, it is an unapologetically moral poetry; if it is not uplifting or didactic poetry in any crude sense, it reveals a strong ethical impulse. A few poems do lapse into a flatness that may reflect a proximity to the flattening effects of the subject under critique–e.g. the poem “From ‘Lessons From Television.’ ” And one or two poems seem vulnerable to the charge of linguistic gamesmanship: They are clever, but also perhaps twee (e.g. “Lost Rules of Usage”).
These are minor flaws, and not all readers would agree that they are flaws. This is a mature, disciplined, ecological poetry informed but never overwhelmed by Stewart’s long study of the classics, ballads, 17th Century lyric and the history of the traditions and meters of English and American poetry.
“There’s no technique in the grass./There’s no technique in the rose,” she observes in “Dark the Star.” But there is technique in this poetry, and ideally in farming, and in making cars, making love, making houses, making cities, making choices. It is technique that allowed “the astronomer/[who] imagined the stars in their orbits” to build “his orrery of glass and string”:
he was making a kind of singing
that came from far beyond
himself, beyond the sounds
that human mouths will bring
into a form of being.
(“Ellipse”)
So here Johannes Kepler, the astronomer unnamed in the poem but specified in the notes, makes his model of the universe. A figure for the poet and for any of us, he takes up his role in the human drama of imagining and making–the materialization of ideas, that dignified work of mind and hand so brilliantly explored by Karl Marx (in his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844) and pursued as well by Arendt and Scarry.
Stewart does not recoil, however, from the ambiguities of human making. We have made pesticides, nuclear weapons and murderous ideologies as well as parks, cathedrals, gardens and poems: “The mind wants an object and then recoils at what it has done.” Alive to these complexities, to the pressures of time and history and the fleeting moment, these poems deftly ring their changes through the English language, the percussive force of existence registered “[l]ike starlings in winter the wind beating against their beating wings/the air numb and mutely blank a whiteness/tumbling the dead leaves.”
What we have in “Columbarium” is a poetry dedicated not to the expression of personality but rather to the shaping of sentience through form–the testing of the mind against the recalcitrance of the given world, its elements, our luck; the testing of intention against time; the testing of the world against the witnessing mind:
If you’re interested in immortality
it’s best to plant a tree, and even
then you can’t be sure that form
will last under weather.
(“Apple”)
This book, like all beautifully made things, is likely to last under many weathers, however alert to perishability its author reminds us to be.
