This Momentary World

JODY STEWART (aka Pamela Stewart) began writing because she couldn't draw. Over the years, she's published five chapbooks, six longer poetry collections, taught at ASU, Univ, of Arizona, UC Irvine, and the University of Houston. A Guggenheim took her to St. Ives, Cornwall where she lived for seven half-magical years before landing back in western Massachusetts where she lives on a retired farm with a few animals including a rescue race horse, his donkey, and an emu named Nigel.

Praise for Jody Stewart:  

For over forty years now, I have followed with great admiration the career of Jody Stewart. She aligns herself to the tradition of those essential Middle Generation poets, Bishop and Jarrell. She possesses something of Bishop's acuity of seeing and hard-won sense of wonder, and something of Jarrell's narrative complexity and recognition of heartbreak. Stewart has also hewn a style that is all her own, notable - among other things - for its startling enjambments, its idiosyncratic but exacting approach to syntax, and its haunted (and singular) music. This generous selection, drawn from five decades of work, represents contemporary poetry at its very best. -David Wojahn, on This Momentary World

To read Pamela (Jody) Stewart's This Momentary World is to witness through the heightened lens of poetry nearly half a century of living. The young poet observes, 'When an eye closes, the ear / begins to hear,' charting how loss pushed her into new appreciations. Stewart's early poems are in conversation with other writers, other books and works of art, other times outside of her own. Then, as the poet grows, she draws closer to her own life and the resulting poems become more urgent: She fills the void of an absent father with observation and invention, 'the texture of objects, the damp / skin of husbands, the shifting colors of all cats / who've ever needed her have proved the father will not come back.' Later, as she runs a textile farm, 'Everything built and done is daily' and 'Wind blows dust from summer roadsides / into a lace which wraps the apple trees.' Yet even as Stewart's poems become more grounded in the world, they continue to reach beyond it, asking questions about the divine and insisting until the final page, 'I want to know what's forbidden, / to enter that space / an apple takes from the heart of tree.'-Jessica Jacobs, author of Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going & Nickole Brown, author of Sister and Fanny Says