rev. of Infrequent Mysteries by Pamela Stewart

In "My Neighbor and Myself," Pamela Stewart recalls, after almost thirty years, a playmate dressed for first communion: ". . . polished shoes, string / of funny beads, infected me with doubt" about her own transcendental conversations with God under a maple tree. For Stewart, doubt suffuses the roil of human affairs, and the poems in her fourth collection continually stir the ground just as the reader begins to settle — whether in "Sunbathing," where a sojourn among buttercups ends with a glimpse of "busy darkness," or with the casual sentence, "Later that year / I stopped loving you," dropped amid descriptions of "Fredus M. Berger & his ‘missus’" in "On the Outer Banks." A rich American whose vulgarities amuse the British uppercrust in "Lessons of the Day" weathers the Occupation in France by providing "cigarettes / and bread . . . felt slippers / for ulcerated feet." Stewart's art teaches that mysteries of
character and affection halo the ordinary like "the original blur at the edge of light" that childhood's nightlight cast in "The Bostonian Reads Amachai."

Stewart's territory includes infidelity and family silence, the dark paintings of Francis Bacon and bronzes invested with breath in the Barbara Hepworth Museum. Poems from Cornwall, where Stewart lived for seven years, are vivid with the pulse of landscape without ever degenerating into travelogue.
Infrequent Mysteries succeeds in chronicling the meditations of a spirit which, as Stewart writes in the title poem, "can't take no for an answer," yet ". . . won't / recognize yes."