Cinder: New and Selected Poems

by Susan Stewart

Overview

“One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Salt

to the Nth, like the truth of an ending
unskeined across the crust of the white field.
Though it happened only once, I
am sending the thought
of the thought
continuing.
To return to
the field before the mowing.
When a goldfinch swayed
on a blue stem stalk,
and the wind and the sun
stirred the hay.

—from “After the Mowing”

Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared.

“Stewart explores our insatiable desire to remember and make meaning out of this remembering,” Ange Mlinko writes in The Nation. “Stewart’s elegiac bent has broadened, over time, from the personal lyric . . . to what might be called the cultural lyric. Fewer and fewer of her poems reference what she alone remembers; they are about what you and I remember.”

Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977955
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poetry, including Columbarium, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former MacArthur Fellow and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Pine: New Poems (2009-2015)

Field in Winter 5

Pine 6

A Language 10

Inscriptions for Gas Pump TVs 13

Piano Music for a Silent Movie 14

Atavistic Sonnet 17

Two Poems on the Name of Vermeer

Toward the lake 18

From the lake 20

Four Lack Songs 22

A Clown 23

"If you were one of the travelers, the guests" 27

The Knot 32

The dead inscribed, alphabetical, within 33

Voice-over 38

First Idyll 42

After the Mowing 43

Field in Spring 47

From Red Rover (2008)

The Owl 51

Lavinium 53

Games from Children

My mother's garden 55

Shadowplay 56

Tag 58

Red rover 59

Oil and Water 63

Titus 65

Thoughts made of wood 67

When I'm crying, I'm not speaking 68

When I'm speaking, I'm not crying 69

Songs for Adam

Adam lay a-bounden, bounden in a bond 70

The names 71

The dream 72

The cool of the evening 74

Lullahye 75

As clerkes find written in their book 76

Gold and Soil 78

Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006 79

Wrens 82

The Lost Colony 83

In the Western World

The sun is charity 85

A boy's voice 86

The window seat 87

The figure in the garden 88

A little room 90

The rocks beneath the water 91

There is no natural death 92

Moon at morning 93

The fox 94

The Field of Mars as a Meadow 95

From Columbarium (2003)

Sung from the generation of AIR 103

The flight 107

Whisper 108

The memory of happiness in a time of misery 109

The survival of Icarus 110

Listen 111

"I had a little dove" 112

Apple 113

Bees 117

"Dark the star" 119

Ellipse 120

Forms of Forts

Hay fort 124

Snow fort 126

"Let me tell you about my marvelous god" 127

Two Brief Views of Hell 128

Kingfisher Carol 130

The Rose 132

Scarecrow 134

Lost Rules of Usage 137

Vigil 138

Wings 139

From The Forest (1995)

The Forest 143

Slaughter 146

Cinder 155

1936 156

The Arbor 1937 157

Holzweg 162

The Desert (1990-1993) 164

The Meadow 173

From The Hive (1987)

Man Dancing with a Baby 177

Seven Bridges 178

Consecration 179

Fire Ceremony 182

The Evening of Montale's Death 184

In the Novel 186

Life on Other Planets 187

The Map of the World Confused with Its Territory 189

At the Font of Aretusa 191

From Yellow Stars and Ice (1981)

Letter Full of Blue Dresses 195

The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden Pison, where there is gold 197

Gihon, that compasseth the whole land 198

Hiddekel, that is it which goeth toward the east 199

Euphrates 200

How the River Climbed into This Poem 201

Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals 203

The Summons 207

The Delta Parade 208

Yellow Stars and Ice 211

The Dedication of Sleep 213

Notes 217

Acknowledgments 219

Editorial Reviews

[Cinder] brings together the best writing from this singular poet, who masterfully explores the intersection of language, the external world and human consciousness. . . . [Susan Stewart] demonstrates the richness and fluidity of thought.”—Washington Post

“Stewart’s poetry stresses to us that we will always have to try again to find the words that will fix and hold our experience, as she herself will surely be trying again. In the meantime Cinder offers a rich sample of the bounty collected in her nets so far.”—Boston Review

“By every definition Stewart makes poetry worthy of its place in our lives.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“Susan Stewart writes the kind of poem, virtuosic and illuminating, that goes on giving warmth and light long after the proverbial switch has been flipped off.”—The American Poetry Review

“[Cinder] showcases Stewart's accomplished and ongoing exploration of poetry as musical, embodied thinking. . . . Her poems are grounded in a deep, assured prosody. . . . [They] carve a space between knowing and unknowing, inviting the luminous and the obscure in equal measure. . . . Stewart primes readers to listen with the attentiveness from which her poems arise.”—Publishers Weekly

“Stewart is not a poet to miss, which makes this New and Selected an exciting opportunity.”—Library Journal

“MacArthur fellow Stewart’s first, career-spanning collection represents 35 years of thought-provoking poems and proves that she continues to rekindle the fires of her creativity and perception, along with those of her readers. . . . Stewart’s poems evoke wonder by building layers of knowledgeable observations, only to let them all dissolve and begin again. . . . Stewart’s poetry inspires by virtue of the poet’s seeking discovery yet resisting final answers.”—Booklist

“Cinder: New and Selected Poems is a gift to literature, language, and these reachings into the ‘natural’ recesses of the human psyche. She challenges the givens, challenges the damage being done in so many ways. One of the most literary-aware of all poets writing in English, she reinvents form to make constantly anew.” —John Kinsella

“The opportunity to hold the arc of such a remarkable poet's oeuvre in the palm of your hand is truly a rare gift. Simply put, this is an absolutely outstanding poetry collection. . . . Cinder is brilliant, vibrant, and essential reading.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips

“It is a moment for Susan Stewart’s Cinder to come into the world—her first book which contains a generous and carefully chosen selection of her work, spanning more than three decades of her transformations. Her poems surge with the wyrd frisson of the quotidian brushing up against the Unordinary. The poems mend; the poems tear. They keep vigil with the cerebral—the linguistic and the formally inventive—and keep company, as well, with the devotional, the playful, the political. And who is more wise than Stewart, more artful, more deft than she?”—Lucie Brock-Broido

“Susan Stewart’s achievement, in a career spanning almost forty years and showcased in Cinder: New and Selected Poems, is remarkable and virtually unique among contemporary American poets. . . . What Stewart accomplishes is nothing less than the reenchantment of the world.”—John Koethe

“The particular wonder that is Susan Stewart as both incisive poet and path-breaking scholar manifests itself throughout this illuminating, at moments incantatory, gathering. Her measures explore the world’s appearances, incidents, and accidents with care and acuity, teasing forth their music and mysteries by means of a patient, yet relentless, and relentlessly human, focus.”—Michael Palmer

“At the edge of lyric practice lies an understanding that all things, all beings, exist not as totalities but as—and in—passages. Susan Stewart’s poetry affirms the relational nature of lyric structures, as they touch the fragility and durability of human experience. . . . Within her work’s rich sensorium resides an understanding of poetry’s unique capacity to celebrate, to conjure, and to mourn. Cinder is a landmark edition by one of the major intellects of contemporary American letters.”—Elizabeth Willis

“Susan Stewart seems to draw her experience from a source deeper than the level of rational clarification. She has at least two voices: one delicate, coming close to what we associate with the organic, having the force and pliancy of young trees, young flowers, young grass; and a second one, tough and realistic, like in ‘1936’ or ‘Cinder.’ How interesting the contrast. How fascinating.”—Adam Zagajewski

From the Publisher

01/16/2017
Spanning 35 years and six collections, this generous assemblage showcases Stewart’s accomplished and ongoing exploration of poetry as musical, embodied thinking. Stewart’s work finds continuity across a range of styles and approaches. Whether lush or stripped-down, her poems are grounded in a deep, assured prosody. She uses received forms and experiments with new lyric possibilities while remaining steeped in tradition. And regardless of pace or breadth of topic, Stewart is always dedicated to awakening the sensual qualities of language. Throughout, Stewart’s poems carve a space between knowing and unknowing, inviting the luminous and the obscure in equal measure. In a new poem she writes: “The corners, the edge, of each/ thing exposed:/ you walked into a new transparency.” It is typical of Stewart’s poetics that visibility arrives through a partial shrouding. By leaning far into the uncertain and the unseen, Stewart retrieves moments of clarity. Expression breaks into refrain, echo, an occasional moment of onomatopoeia, even stutters, visual caesuras, and, in a new poem, unsounded symbols: “* blank fog// misting// starless// fog ## and mist// descending// the windlass/ winding static.” If, over the decades represented here, American culture has become increasingly frenetic, Stewart’s work has responded inversely, increasing patience. At her best, Stewart primes readers to listen with the attentiveness from which her poems arise. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

02/15/2017
National Book Critics Circle winner Stewart (Columbarium) here gathers poems written from 1981 to 2015, offering a nice selection published for the first time in book form. Over the past 34 years, Stewart's poems have become less dense and more experimental, which is evident throughout this collection. The more recent entries are airy, playful, and light—though certainly not lightweight. Stewart often goes in search of the places where contradictions meet. Her poems don't resolve the incongruities they introduce so much as extend them to their logical (and illogical) conclusions. With its sing-song style, the title poem suggests the irony driving the work. Reading like a nursery rhyme, "Cinder" is deceptively simple, with an ending that begs closer inspection of the whole piece. VERDICT These poems do not have messages, yet they do have meaning. Those who realize that will get them. Those who don't should go back to reading Joyce Kilmer. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Library Journal