The poems in TIME'S BODY show Dabney Stuart's usual wide range of subjects: from baseball to quantum physics, the American southwest to New Zealand, Paul Cezanne to George Herbert. The suggestion of a Chinese influence, pervasive in his previous book, Greenbrier Forest, appears again here in several compressed lyrics, such as the title poem. There is also his characteristic psychological insight, delight in language and dreams, and his trademark formal variety, engaging what he called in a 2001 interview, "the tension between the verse pattern and the voice playing within and against it." Conrad Aiken said of his first book, Stuart's "skill is modest about itself." Here, nearly 50 years and 19 books later, that's still true.

Dabney Stuart's love for the animals that inhabit the earth pulses through this new collection of poems for the young and the young at heart.From rhinoceros to remora, iguana to impala, whale to water buffalo, & chameleon to crocodile-the dozens of animals in Stuart's poems come alive in a spirit of playfulness. Coupled with Susan Elliott's spirited watercolors, the poems magnify the wonders of being young. His poems show the beauty and enchantment of friendship: the koala and the kiwi, the eel and the clam, the fiddler crab and his companions, and the dove cooing to an empty sky, hoping another hears.