Poetry. Stuart Bartow is a poet of boundless imagination. Though his obsessions--birds, stars, myths, ships, spiders, love--remain constant, he rings constant and surprising changes on them. He is a nature poet in the good old-fashioned romantic sense: his inquiries into the natural world open out into the widest metaphysical speculations about the nature of life and reality. These poems are beautiful, enlightening, and often funny. Bartow simply thinks things no one else ever would.--Barbara Ungar