The Hallelujah Series and Other Poems

'The Hallelujah Series' is a splendid book of poems encircling and questioning the role of place in our lives-the role of place in this beautiful world, in this rough and tough yet delicate island home. Art Stewart's seventh volume of science-inspired poems invoke imagery providing a crisp, stained-glass view of life and place in these peculiar times of science, love, despair, and hope. He delivers simple but poignant messages, poem after poem, with precision and wonder, over scales large and small, in a delightfully accessable style: "The delicate web / astonishes us with dew and how it arcs / from gravity and how it bends in breeze, // astonishes us / with its chemical simplicity / its structural form and by the fact it was / pinned in darkness overnight." And hallelujah to that: yes, hallelujah, the word that has spawned "great swaths of music: imagine / waves of praise all ye, Yah, / rising, hill after distant hill, ascending / in a massive chorus, an offering / to flowers, fields, mountains." These poems remind us, over and over, of the importance of life as we rush about, from day to day, from place to place, knowing, but not certain how to live.