Jody Stewart (née Pamela Stewart) is a poet whose work I have loved for going on forty years. From the very first collections, The St. Vlas Elegies (1977) and Cascades (1979), to the later, major collections, such as The Red Window (1997) and Ghost Farm (2010), I recognized her unique gift. Stewart is one of the finest lyric poets now writing in this country. The genre of “lyric” is almost indefinable, because lyric poems don’t always finish their stories (as narrative poems do) or tell us what to think (as didactic poems try to do). It is generally agreed, however, that one of the genre’s signature characteristics is at times mysterious but beautiful and/or haunting imagery, and that one reads the imagery in a lyric poem for what it “says,” but doesn’t translate. Stewart, for instance, takes on many issues of concern, such as domestic violence and serious illness, without lecturing us or holding forth. Another major characteristic of the lyric genre is that lyric poems often “sing.” They pay careful attention to the music of the words. Consider the following short passage from “From the Summer Porch,” and I think you’ll see what I mean:

 
Note the long e’s, that assonance in this descriptive passage, which connects feeders-bees-leaves as a “sound-motif,” creating the tension as the hawk’s shadow “stains” the sky. Often, we expect a mournful undertone on the long o, and we do hear that running through know-golden-shadow, but those long o’s are interrupted by short vowel sounds, which helps to build the tension. The poem is pastoral, and thus the threat, when it arrives, is to an earthly paradise the poem glimpses “for one essential daily moment.” It is that moment the two poems by Stewart included here also celebrate. 

When I first met Stewart many years ago, she was a professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University, accomplished, already confident in her voice, exceedingly modest—almost to a fault—and generous with her time. She still is. In those days, it was rare to be able to work with a woman poet, and we women in ASU’s creative writing program gathered ourselves around her, savoring the privilege. Stewart went on to teach at UC Irvine, University of Arizona, and University of Houston before receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, in order to research Arthurian legend in England. She didn’t return for some seven years, marrying a Cornwall native son and making a life in St. Ives, Cornwall. When she did return, she and her husband ran a working farm in Western Massachusetts, raising Angora goats and the occasional Icelandic sheep and llama. The working farm has now been retired, and Stewart has returned full force to writing and publishing, most recently, This Momentary World: Selected Poems (Nine Mile Books, 2022). In addition to a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stewart has been awarded fellowships from Hawthornden Castle, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

To open a book by Jody Stewart is to enter another world—full of what David Wojahn has described recently as a “hard-won sense of wonder”—poems that are filled with Stewart’s “haunted and singular music.” There is to her poetry a crystalline elegance of syntax, a deceptive simplicity of diction, but also the meticulously observed details of the dailiness of life on a farm. The later poetry is full of a profound wisdom, perhaps drawn from working closely with animals and being a long-term cancer survivor. As she puts it in the author’s celebratory Foreword to This Momentary World, “I’m older now. Yay! I love being older; a bee in the center of a zinnia is a fine event.” That last observation is worthy of her “neighbor” from another century, Emily Dickinson, whose Homestead is just down the road from Stewart’s retired farm in Hawley. I think of Stewart as having the tonal equivalent in her poetry of a musician’s perfect pitch. Her imagery is astonishingly beautiful, and her poetic ear is dazzling. Personally, I marvel at her poems, learn from their technique, return to ponder their insights. I hope you’ll follow up this brief introduction by acquiring her latest collection, but for now, please savor the marvelously varied Eastern States Poetry that Jody Stewart has curated for our winter issue of Persimmon Tree.

When I was first teaching, I would tell students that “poetry has a spiritual life of its own” and, while I wasn’t sure what I meant, I knew I believed it and still do. Spirit/breath—what we breathe in and then return to the air—perhaps to touch, speak, sing, or share. How could one know where such forces might land. So many poems were submitted for this December issue, and, alas, I could only choose 15. Yet I would have loved to take a poem from each person who kindly submitted; what an anthology that would have been!

To read so many poems was both intriguing and moving. You poets all held so much in common: family love (grandkids!), grief, caregiving, personal trauma deflected through poetry, the physical self, political anguish, the natural world with its joys and damages, and works of real humor—all of which I would have enjoyed including. I felt I was listening to everyone have quite wonderful conversations with each other. And the clearly shared thread amongst all the voices? Courage! Lots of it.

As reasonably “mature” women we have all been through major difficulties, and there is much we recognize in each other. The more poems shared, the better we may come to understand one another. Lately, we may be aware of, and discouraged by, truly scary stuff. It takes courage to step up day by day, and courage to write of it, to speak out. Yet you all do! Brava! Poetry’s spiritual force insists on it.

End Notes:
1.  Ian, the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S., was a Category 4 monster when it clobbered Southwest Florida on September 28, 2022. Ian tied Hurricane Charlie, 2004, as the fourth-most-powerful storm ever to hit Florida. (Internet news source, 2023)

2.  Hurricane Ian was predicted to make landfall near Tampa, which spent days preparing for severe storm conditions, but actually entered Florida further south near Ft. Myers, which was unprepared for the event.

Locusts and drought plague the new land. My child, 
you say, will not be born here, 
struggle not to think of what’s left behind—
 
dear papa, my sisters, are you gone?
 
Eight years later in a Brooklyn walk-up, you scramble eggs
in bacon grease, juice oranges and strain the seeds, 
watch me eat as if that can fill you—
 
you say you don’t believe— how can there be a god?
Still, you call yourself a Jew— 
Miriam, what did they do to you? 
 
Teach me a new language: 
cool cloth on fevered forehead 
is love; plastic couch cover translates to 
 
fear of going without, again; 
shrouded mirrors after death means 
maybe there is a god. 
 
Bruised by a husband who punched
and the son who turned away, 
would you forgive that I saw
 
but didn’t speak? My daughter is named for you,
for how you held your palm
on my cheek. And on my sweetheart’s hand, 
 
the ring that bound your finger
as you planted seeds in grudging dirt.