May 25, 2013
Susan Stewart
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imagination. For instance, in Columbarium, her recent National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, there's a lovely little lyric called "Kingfisher Carol." It begins with an epigraph from the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend that explains the origin of the meaning of halcyon in the imagined habits of the kingfisher, a bird also known as a halcyon. Now I would be happy enough with this bit of arcana, but Stewart follows it with a lovely little lyric where season, sea, and bird combine with Christian images:
| Star for the shepherds, star for the kings and the kingfishers perched on the waves. On the halcyon sea, they nest their nests from twigs and briars and hay. |
Although the regular meter and the assonance, so strong it almost sounds like rhyme, are atypical of her poems, the urge to put all these different kinds of things together in musical language is not. It is how Stewart makes her poems.
"Scarecrow," a poem that moves around on the page in a dramatic way that can't be replicated in Observer columns, might be more typical of Stewart's practice. Stewart
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