Stuart Bartow

Einstein's Lawn Stuart Bartow

Poetry. Science. Philosophy. Stuart Bartow's EINSTEIN'S LAWN takes more than one leaf of grass from Whitman in creating a capacious, tender, and, finally, unifying field. He does this by showing the invisible at play. Once on the other side of time / the beginning begins again. Bartow tells us, as if to indicate what happens to the man painting a painting of a man painting a painting in an infinite regression. These poems exist on the threshold where each of us carries a labyrinth into a labyrinth. Einstein's unruly head of hair, the chaos of his desk, are proofs of his general relativity theory, and the quantum universe embedded in the human heart. We are warned the very thing you are trying to capture / will disappear as instantly as a person / in a dream, a fish panicked by a shadow. Even so, there is the wind that embraces us / like a being that seeks to wind us into one. This includes Mary Shelley's deathless Frankenstein's creature, the monster who ventures north where icy winds weave a blanket around him as a mother might. The poems in this rare collection are always moving toward epiphanies that leave us feeling as though we'd stepped into a momentary glimpse and lived there for a lifetime.--Paul Pines