Old Flame

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.