From Publishers Weekly

Poet-critic and MacArthur fellow Stewart's (On Longing) fourth book of verse contains two pairs of long poems on the elements-"Sung from the generation of AIR" and "Drawn from the generation of FIRE" at the book's beginning and "Wrought from the generation of EARTH" and "Flown from the generation of WATER" at its close. They surround a long middle section of "shadow georgics" organized alphabetically by title: "Apples," "Bees," "Braid," "Cross/ X," "Dark the Star," down through "X/ Cross," "To You and for You" and "Zero." This clever, embedded patterning suggests that the alphabet and language are akin to nature's elements, elements that the poet gathers and disperses into a variety of visually divergent forms, enacting the perpetual mutability of nature. In "Braid," for instance, Stewart moves from a painstaking description of fingers and hair to the telling, if somewhat heavy-handed announcement: "You can tell a story/ many ways. You can leave/ something out or put// something in; you can fool/ yourself and hide./ You can shake out// the form or try/ to manage every wisp,/ but the latter will// only bring you pain." Throughout the collection, the poet delves into human universals (memory, breath, voice, whisper, loneliness, etc.) while constantly attentive to etymology and word choice, and she makes scholarly reference to scores of classical and Biblical figures including Virgil, Hecuba, Peleus, Isaiah, Lot and Lazarus. But as in previous work, it is moments of brief and simple aphorism ("Build fires to worship the wood, burn wood to worship the fire") that forcefully summarize the book's project.
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Review

"Susan Stewart's most fiercely intelligent and ambitious [book] to date.... Readers of Columbarium will be rewarded throughout by the poet's remarkable acumen and edifying sense of purpose." - Nadia Herman Colburn, Boston Review "Wonderfully imaginative.... Each of the poems takes a radically different form, and no two are alike. It's as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms." - Edward Hirsch, "Poet's Choice," Washington Post "It is a privilege and joy to share the workings of a beautiful mind.... To feel the physical and intellectual command of the mercurial shiftings of tone; the rippling reticulations of stanza, line, phrase, and phoneme; the Roman candles of a comic spirit; and the silences - silences 'like breathing moonlight.'" - Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal "Within American poetry, Stewart's Columbarium is, to my mind, the finest book of the last five years, in its technical brilliance, philosophical questioning, and lyrical beauty.... Most of Stewart's poems are rich in classical and philosophical allusion.... The pastoral, the bucolic lyric has been pressured and transformed." - John Kinsella, Sydney Morning Herald "A profoundly imagined book, this is one of the most impressive and serious volumes of poetry to come out in the last five years. This is a book worth owning and returning to over many years....An essential poetry, a poetry of essences and elements, coupled with an awareness of existential transience." - Maureen L. McLane, Chicago Tribune