"The poems in this year's National Book Critic's Circle-winning volume are disarmingly--and deceptively--direct, refracting light in every direction like the little gems that are. Stewart observes the world carefully and comes up with some startling conclusions."

Library Journal

"A very good book. Stewart is a fluid lyricist with an excellent ear, a good sense of pacing, and a gift for making abstract language seem rooted and real."

David Orr | Poetry

"A profoundly imagined book, this is one of the most impressive and serious volumes of poetry to come out in the past five years. This is a book worth owning and returning to over many years. . . This book, like all beautifully made things, is likely to last under many weathers, however alert to perishability its author reminds us to be."

Maureen N. McLane | Chicago Tribune

"[Stewart's] most fiercely intelligent and ambitious [book] to date. . . . Readers of Columbarium will be rewarded throughout by the poet's remarkable acumen and edifying sense of purpose."

Nadia Herman Colburn | Boston Review

"These poems are gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on."

Dan Chiasson | Poetry

"If each niche in this columbarium holds a shadow urn with ashes of our literary and philosophical ancestors, I welcome them as the poet’s art endows them with fresh significance. If each is a working of the earth/air/fire/water of our multiple senses, I am more alive by that labor. If each is a pigeonhole in a dovecote, I rejoice at the uniqueness of each dove. I fly afield to feed, returning always to settle into this elegant architecture."

Marion Stocking | Beloit Poetry Journal

"Throughout the collection, the poet delves into human universals (memory, breath, voice, whisper, loneliness, etc.) while constantly attentive to etymology and word choice . . . . But as in previous work, it is moments of brief and simple aphorism that forcefully summarize the book’s project."

Publishers Weekly

"In her wonderfully imaginative fourth poetry book, Columbarium, Susan Stewart invents a type of poem she calls ’shadow georgics.’ . . . Stewart’s ’shadow georgics’ are organized alphabetically by title. The format suggests a parallel between language and nature, the alphabet and the elements. The carpentry is extensive; each of the poems takes a radically different form, and no two are alike. It’s as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms."

Edward Hirsch | Poet's Choice, Washington Post