Page last updated: November 23, 2018
All pages copyright © 2018 by Pinyon Publishing
TIME’S BODY
Poems by Dabney Stuart
The poems in Time’s Body show Dabney Stuart’s usual wide range of subjects: from baseball to quantum physics, the American southwest to New Zealand, Paul Cézanne to George Herbert. The suggestion of a Chinese influence, pervasive in his previous book, Greenbrier Forest, appears again here in several compressed lyrics, such as the title poem. There is also his characteristic psychological insight, delight in language and dreams, and his trademark formal variety, engaging what he called in a 2001 interview, “the tension between the verse pattern and the voice playing within and against it.”
Conrad Aiken said of his first book, Stuart’s “skill is modest about itself.” Here, nearly 50 years and 19 books later, that’s still true.
DABNEY STUART has published 18 previous volumes of poetry, most recently Greenbrier Forest, Open the Gates, Tables, Family Preserve, and The Man Who Loves Cézanne. A former resident at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, he has also held a Virginia Artists Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize for 2006. His work is in the audio and video archives at the Library of Congress. Stuart and his wife Sandra live in Lexington, Virginia.PRAISE FOR TIME’S BODY
“Dabney Stuart’s poems are remarkable for their unforced intimacy, the ease by which they draw the reader into their ongoing drama of consciousness. In this generous gathering of new and earlier work there is a devoted effort to expand the limits of perception, and an acute sensitivity to the contours of inner and outer worlds. Stuart’s supple movements between description and meditation may recall a poet like Howard Nemerov, or, going back in time, Andrew Marvell, or a prose artist such as Thoreau; but his quiet, considering, companionable voice is entirely his own. Time’s Body appears well along in this poet’s distinguished career, but it is filled with seminal energy, with the excitement, page by page, of new beginnings.”—ROBERT B. SHAW, author of Aromatics
“Dabney Stuart’s poems are fiercely intelligent, wise, lyrical, sometimes funny. Many of the poems in Time’s Body are old friends. And the new ones are surprising; they are not self-parody, they are actually new. I love this book. It is a pleasure to celebrate the development of an important poet. And what a gift to have so many of Dabney’s poems gathered in one place.”—JEANNE MURRAY WALKER, author of A Deed to the Light and New Tracks, Night Falling
Only the One Sky (2016) A timeless world, dialogs with an old poet, whom we see as he muses in forests, along the river, or come through time (6"x9" paperback, 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-36-6, $16.00).
Greenbrier Forest (2012) Meditations deriving from the sights and sounds of Greenbrier Forest in West Virginia (6"x9" paperback, 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1-936671-03-8, $15.00).
Open the Gates, Poems for Young Readers (2010): (8"x10" paperback, full color, 92 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9821561-6-2, $27.00).
Tables (2009) From nuclear physics to astronomy, Stuart explores themes of family, friction, and art (6"x9" paperback, 100 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9821561-1-7, $15.00, New Mexico Book Award Finalist).
Page last updated: November 23, 2018
All pages copyright © 2018 by Pinyon Publishing