The Forest

An aura of mystery envelops Stewart's (The Hive) third collection of poetry. As she expresses it: ""...Bright night, true story, far torch and door;/ neither yours nor mine, but both..."" Narratives, often rooted in history and reminiscent of fairy tales, are told by unnamed speakers and peopled by figures that can't be pinned down. ""Slaughter,"" a first-person account of learning to butcher, masterfully permits readers to identify with an invisible narrator pitted against an even more fleeting but all-powerful ""they."" Stewart stumbles slightly when she becomes self-consciously literary: as her endnotes inform us, ""Nervous System"" borrows its rhyme scheme from John Donne; the extremely weak, overly long ""Medusa Anthology"" uses language from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her own linguistic sensibility is refined enough not to require such academic justification, which also seems to curb her imagination. These few examples aside, this volume is a rare phenomenon in recent poetry: poems which require several readings, and promise to be equally intriguing each time. (Aug.)