Settlers

Settlers, Dabney Stuart’s thirteenth collection of poems, is a passionate and innovative commentary on exploration and discovery. As the title suggests, the major themes of this work include beginnings in disparate but related areas—the historical, physical, geologic, familial, and psychological. Stuart embeds these rather large considerations in details ranging from tectonic plates and glaciers to the pterodactyl and the observations of a grasshopper. Family ancestors appear as well as writers from earlier centuries. In the effective “The Tapawera Raspberry Festival,” Stuart deftly combines predation, ritual celebration, competition, and joy in a festival set on the South Island of New Zealand.

Settlers’ theological implications become explicit in the final section, through the title poem, and more extensively in the long section entitled “God.” In this thoughtful sequence, Stuart struggles to understand God’s mystifying absence and presence. Simultaneously bewildered, curious, distressed, and delighted, these profoundly reflective poems achieve an understanding of God as “a name for everything timethriving.”

Stuart’s love of language and playfulness as well as his affection for his subjects and their mysteries are part of the fabric of these poems. The affirmation of life in all its rich and various inception shines through every line of this exceptional work.