Arthur J. Stewart spent his career as an aquatic ecologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and The Bunny Hour and Other Selected Poems reads like the record of someone who never stopped noticing. He counts the five catheters going into a friend’s boy before heart surgery. He personifies time as a wanderer drifting down the Jordan, spelling words backward out of boredom. He watches a cyclone cross Mars, wondering how it would feel on his skin. Trimmed to roughly eighty of his strongest poems across two decades, this is a career’s worth of attention distilled: curious, unsentimental, and quietly moving.
Another New Release from Art Stewart