cover image Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems

Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems

David St John. Harper Perennial, $22 (142pp) ISBN 978-0-06-055349-4

This dazzling collection opens with the cinematic ``Slow Dance'' from St. John's ( Hush ) first book, and ends with the brilliantly conceived title poem, an extended meditation on the ``body of desire,'' placed alongside a skeletally-shaped elegy for a friend. Both poems use dance as a central metaphor for the movement of each individual through life, framing the volume's overarching concerns with the tensions between body and spirit, desire and fulfillment and the ``balance of the promise with what lasts.'' The metaphor is an apt one for St. John's own evolving grace and style as a poet who invents richly textured narratives out of episodic detail, collage-like imagery and long rhythmic lines to create the effect of movement and suspension, not unlike a complexly choreographed dance. The book's final sections, featuring the poet's new work, confirm St. John's status as a poet of impressive aesthetic vision who continues to push the boundaries of narrative, language and imagination as he explores the ``momentary resurrections'' of human existence, ``The stilled body / Giving the illusion / That it might be rising / Quite on its own.'' (Aug.)