3 Review(s)

In Columbarium, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate this text. Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.