STUART, Dabney

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Nationality: American. Born: Richmond, Virginia, 4 November 1937. Education: Davidson College, North Carolina, 1956–60, A.B. 1960; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Summer Poetry Prize, 1962), A.M. 1962. Family: Married Sandra Westcott (third marriage) in 1983; one daughter and two sons. Career: Instructor in English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1961–65; instructor, 1965–66, assistant professor, 1966–69, associate professor, 1969–74, professor, 1974–91, and since 1991 S. Blount Mason Professor of English, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. Visiting professor, Middlebury College, Vermont, 1968–69, and Ohio University, Athens, spring 1975; resident poet, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1978; visiting poet, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1981, 1982–83. Poetry editor, Shenandoah, Lexington, 1966–76, and editor-in-chief, 1988–95; member of the editorial board, Poets in the South, 1974–82; poetry editor, New Virginia Review, 1983. Awards: Poetry Society of America Dylan Thomas prize, 1965; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, fellowship 1974, 1982; Borestone Mountain award, 1969, 1974, 1977; Virginia Governor's award, 1979; Guggenheim fellowship, 1987–88; Virginia Individual Artist fellowship, 1995; residency at Bellagio Study and Conference Center, spring 2000. Address: Department of English, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia 24450, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Diving Bell. New York, Knopf, 1966.

A Particular Place. New York, Knopf, 1969.

Corgi Modern Poets in Focus 3, with others, edited by Dannie Abse, London, Corgi, 1971.

The Other Hand. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

Friends of Yours, Friends of Mine. Richmond, Virginia, Rainmaker Press, 1974.

Round and Round: A Triptych. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

Rockbridge Poems. Emory, Virginia, Iron Mountain Press, 1981.

Common Ground. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Don't Look Back. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Narcissus Dreaming. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

Light Years: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Second Sight. St. Louis, University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Long Gone. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Strains of the Old Man. Abingdon, Virginia, Sow's Ear Press, 1999.

Settlers. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Short Stories

Sweet Lucy Wine: Stories. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

The Way to Cobbs Creek. St. Louis, University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Other

Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

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Manuscript Collections: Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.

Critical Studies: By X.J. Kennedy, in Shenandoah (Lexington, Virginia), autumn 1966; John Unterecker, in Shenandoah (Lexington, Virginia), autumn 1969; Dannie Abse, in Corgi Modern Poets in Focus 3, 1971; by the author, in Contemporary Poetry in America, edited by Miller Williams, New York, Random House, 1973; D.E. Richardson, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), autumn 1976; Stephen Dobyns, in Washington Post Book World, 7 November 1982; Fred Chappell, in Roanoke Times (Virginia), 27 March 1983, and 30 August 1987; "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds" by Barbara Fialkowski, in Poets in the South (Tampa, Florida), fall 1984; Robert Gingher, in Greensboro News and Record (North Carolina), 7 June 1987; Paul Ramsey, in Chronicles (Rockford, Illinois), March 1989; "Every Poet in His Humor," in The Georgia Review (Athens), winter 1990, and "Not As a Leaf: Southern Poetry and the Innovation of Tradition," in The Georgia Review (Athens), fall 1997, both by Fred Chappell; "A Dream Not of Wholeness, but of Endless Dreaming" by Gilbert Allen, and "The Long Mirror: Dabney Stuart's Film Allusions" by Fred Chappell, in the Dabney Stuart issue of Kentucky Poetry Review, 27(1), spring 1991; by Warren Werner in The Chatahoochee Review (Dunwoody), winter 1991; by Greg Johnson in The Georgia Review (Athens), winter 1992–93; by Haines Sprunt in The Hollins Critic (Roanoke), June 1993; "Six Davidson Poets: The Consolation of Some memorable Language" by Barbara Mayer, in The Davidson Journal (Davidson, North Carolina), fall 1993; "The Poetry of Grown Men" by Brendan Galvin, in Tar River Poetry, spring 1995; "Poetry Chronicle" by R.S. Gwynn, in Hudson Review, XLIX(2), summer 1996; "Six Soloists" by Betty Adcock, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 32(4), winter 1996.

Dabney Stuart comments:

My work ranges formally from traditional English patterns to associative, nonmetrical verse. My more recent poems, since and including Common Ground, have been characterized by a combination of aspects of both strains in individual poems, including the use of irregularly patterned half rhymes, acrostic structures, and nonce forms. I have been consistently involved with certain themes and subject matter: family relationships, particularly those involving parents and children, levels of consciousness mirrored in language, the unforeseen and ubiquitous past, shifting perspective, cultural icons, isolation, dreams, the hidden self. The work of Alice Miller (Prisoners of Childhood, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware), Margaret Mahler, certain seventeenth-century poets, Paul Cezanne, and others have significantly aided me in developing an understanding of the sources of my work and the ways of its maturation. See my autobiographical statement, "Knots into Webs," in volume 105 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

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In his first book, The Diving Bell, Dabney Stuart revealed himself as a skillful and intelligent poet. His command of language and his confident handling of relatively traditional forms are combined with a gentle candor that enables many of the poems in the volume to transcend the category of Lowellesque confessional verse into which they run the risk of falling. There is nothing trite about his contribution to this genre, however. For example, he speaks of the small daughter he seldom sees as a conjurer—"Your voice a wand, you called the olive grapes"—but he later adds,

Yet, deserting your role,
You called me by my name—
I'd rather
have been that metaphor, your father.

Here language is both image and instrument. Stuart's second book, A Particular Place, advances into more adventurous territory. In fact, it includes a number of poems about place, contemplative in tone and dwelling on stone and water, air, and stillness. But it also explores deeper regions of symbol and myth and psychic landscapes in poetry that owes little to traditional forms. Consider, for example, these lines from "The Charles River":

On summer evenings here
Lovers may kiss to Stravinsky:
Le sacre du printemps.
If they lie close enough
To the bank, the music and the river
Lapping the stones
Become one sound …

Although some of the poems are more successful than others, the ones that do succeed achieve a haunting resonance.

Stuart's later books The Other Hand and Round and Round continue to work within the formal and thematic boundaries set by his first two books. That is, most of the poems are written in free verse and tend toward fairly short lines, while thematically the poems are still immersed in the contemplative, second-generation deep image poetry Stuart used in A Particular Place. The changes that occur in the work in these two books primarily involve tone. Stuart begins to exhibit a wider range of tonal expression, from the caustic to the contemplative. These lines from the poem "Mystic" offer an example of his manipulation of tone: "I have seen God O Yes / Don't fondle me with doubt / or any lower case vanity …" Songs for Champagne Saturday also does not offer any major deviation from the work of his earlier volumes. The poems here are competent and interesting but not particularly memorable.

Common Ground, however, shows Stuart moving beyond the earlier books and charting new terrain in which to work. The poems now usually have a longer, more sonically interesting line. The exploration in Round and Round begins to have an effect on his tone. For instance, Stuart occasionally begins to use a highly authoritative tone, as in the end to "Turntables," where he writes about a newborn: "His small body, new in the air, / filling it; / The human music. The awful human music." He is also capable, however, of successfully returning to a more meditative voice, as in "Snorkeling in the Caribbean." Filled by numerous fine poems, Common Ground is work that fulfills the promise his first book offered and is thus a turning point in his career.

The poems that have followed—in Don't Look Back and Narcissus Dreaming and the newer work in his selected poems, Light Years—all profit from what Stuart apparently learned while writing Common Ground. Don't Look Back has several very strong poems, including "Casting," "Taking the Wheel," and the title poem. Ranging over primarily personal terrain, the poems are emotional, yet they are still shaped by the precision that guided Stuart's early work. Many of the poems of Narcissus Dreaming are also powerful. Consider, for instance, the closing lines of the title poem. Narcissus, fishing in a place where the surface ripples wrinkle his reflection, finally gets a bite, and so he reels in his line and pulls in his reflection, "a laid out suit / of clothes lifted / by its center," which he then "lowers" into "the boat" and "takes … upon himself,"

drenched, obscene,
a perfectly imperfect fit,
leaving the water
imageless, opaque,
other.

Firm control of tone and a staccato rhythm fueled by disjointed, surprising line breaks create several memorable poems in this book.

In his collections Long Gone and Settlers Stuart has begun to experiment a bit more with tone, imagery, and subject matter. Although some critics have speculated that his experimentation has been out of an attempt to emulate some of the celebrated experiments of younger poets with form and language, a more plausible answer is that Stuart is exploring, experimenting, and, indeed, changing as a poet. Perhaps Settlers is most indicative of these changes. While tonal control and consistency—a reliance upon the precisely rendered image—was a mainstay of Stuart's career up until the late 1990s, this collection, which focuses primarily on familial difficulties and transitions, uses sharp shifts in tone in order to highlight the painful disruptions the poems consider. Although it is fair to say that Stuart does not seem as comfortable writing in more experimental modes, his range as a poet and his formal control would seem to argue that he can add these sudden, almost filmic shifts to his repertoire.

—Fleur Adcock and

Tod Marshall