Long gone

by Dabney Stuart

From its haunted opening to the complex affirmation of its final lines, this profound collection by Dabney Stuart presents a palimpsest of the spirit in the modern age. With jagged syncopations, lyrical stop-time, and a kind of elegiac swing, these poems spiral through multiple dimensions of time, memory, and emotion - from post-World War II America to the South Pacific - evoking perspectives of the psyche as brooding and cryptic as the Antarctic. Long Gone nimbly weaves carnal and familial love, the search for lost innocence, and the epistemology of memory into moments of hallucinatory focus where insight comes - and goes - like light on water.