Frank Stewart's fourth book of poetry is a meditation on how we may be assimilated so completely by life, art, music, the world of animals, and ecstasy that the self vanishes and a person is transformed into a "human being." In such a case, poetry is not a matter of self-expression but of association and correspondence with others, and art is understood as a form of empathy that overcomes history, time, nation, and language.
The poems in By All Means return us to what is most universal and most human: transiency, mutuability, hope and hopelessness. As the poet Nick Bozanic observes:
...in this work you feel the hesitation which precedes each word, the deliberate motions of a sensibility seeking not to reveal itself but to rediscover and renew something precious on the very lip of loss. The poet's ego here has been completely subsumed by, and consumed by, the redemptive ardors of attention. Frank Stewart offers us neither imitation nor re-representation, rather, he writes as one who respecting--loving--this given world, works to mend its rent fabric, one word at a time. By All Means is an act of patient compassion.
"In the corn and buckwheat, living stars have fallen like a snowy net. Far up the hill I see my neigbor's lamp still lit in his barn. Helping a hard birth, he sits up with his goats. Otherwise, the wide mountain's dark as lava. Floating under a winter moon, the volcano's crest is a silver of ice. The towering upland becomes a dark enigma. The streams run but no one can find their source. I trust my thousands to the cold, longing for nothing. Still, I can't help worrying for the doe, recalling the first bleating of babes I've held who cry out in weakness. Born at dawn, dead at night."
Review:
"By All Means is a riveting collection. Seventeen years after his last book of poetry, Frank Stewart has assimilated a variety of poetic traditions--from the Korean sijo to the ancient Greek Asclepiades of Samos - to form his own distinctive vision. These lapidary lines move with the skill, finesse, and acuity of a master."
-Arthur Sze
"Frank Stewart has done the impossible...here are poems that speak of harsh truths but are exquisitely tender, poems that add poignant humor to life's most sorrowful moments."
-Nguyen Qui Duc
Praise for previous books by Frank Stewart
At his best, Stewart is powerfully sensuous, an antenna for the beauty and sadness of life. The language catches and holds between rising and falling, at the high point of the parabola.
Poetry Flash
There is a quiet and enduring strength in [Stewart's] voice, which is calm, luminous, and forceful. Pain, separation loss, humiliation--all are accepted with equanimity until a strange peace emerges, and we feel a dark, beautiful clarity. Stewart is one of the best poets writing anywhere.
New Letters Review of Books
Everywhere is the pervasive presence of the vast surrounding ocean, the assertive intrusions of a heroic and sublime landscape, of the human inhabitancy. But this is not the Hawai'i you will encounter if you stay too closely moored; it is rather the unexploited landscape described so memorably.
Los Angeles Times
Bio: Frank Stewart is the author of three previous books of poetry and the editor of over two dozen anthologies featuring contemporary translations of literature from throughout Asia and the Pacific. A winner of the Whiting Writer's Award for his poetry, he has edited Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing since 1989. He lives in Hawai'i.
