As a poet of the third generation of modernists, Dabney Stuart has produced a body of work that reveals a rich texture of influences. Beginning as a careful formalist in the accepted manner of the 1950s academic poets, Stuart has worked through a variety of styles to achieve, in his most recent books, a voice that sounds like no other contemporary's. Yet his stylistic variety and use of several formal strategies do not overshadow the concerns of his poetry, which have changed little in twenty-five years. He himself has said, "I have been consistently involved with certain themes, themselves less fragmented and wandering than my voice: son/father and father/son, levels of consciousness, the unforeseen and ubiquitous past, the aloof self-regard of women, the illusion of solidity and perspective, death and punning" ("Knots into Webs: Some Autobiographical Sources," Poets in the South, 1980-1984). Stuart, like many poets...