Critical Review, Tara Allan Stewart's Lazarus Flower by R. Andrew Brown
Tara Allan Stewart created a solid following among readers afflicted with serious illness, their loved ones, their caretakers, and those who simply wanted to know what their fellow humans were enduring. Best known for her amazing poetry collection, Sarah's Garden, Stewart gripped readers with a brutal honesty in the day-to-day living with CFIDS and chronic pain. Many readers were grateful for her therapeutic writings in Sarah's Garden, finding ways to relate her words and images to their own illnesses and disabilities.
First gaining popularity as the driving force behind Shadows & Light anthology, and the on-going literary journal, Skywriters, Stewart bared her self and dealt with disability that had attempted to smother her creative voice, putting forth Sarah's Garden to plant new flowers in cold soil. Those plants have finally come to fruition in her latest offering, the best work of her creative career, Lazarus Flower.
With Lazars Flower, Stewart moves away from her overt focus of disability, and showcases a more whole, more complete view of who Tara Allan Stewart truly is. Readers will never be far from etheric, haunting abstracts and deeply surreal and emotional works, as with "Promises", yet plenty of concrete narrative to keep readers grounded in defined and relatable poems, such as "Hang Glider." Regardless of mode, Stewart delivers stunningly vivid and shattering slap-shot-to-the-face endings: her poems leave readers grasping for more of everything - half-spoken wisdoms whispered between loved ones, with each piece having distinct intent, graceful arcs across the heavens, but with endings like a hammer smashing down with profundity.
Her work possesses an almost Emily Dickinson feel, not quite, but a distant echo, what Dickinson would evolve into, had she had the chance and comfort to unleash her own full range of emotions. At times, Stewart's poetry reflects a divine, Southernly flavored and charmingly told narrative, steady with Native American undertones; other instances showcase beautiful meditations bordering on prayers ("Inhaling Light"), prayers bordering on soft songs ("My Rain") and stunningly simple, common sense lessons on love, life, and loving life. The powerful self-statement in "What's in a name, anyway?" is a prime example of the quest of discovery of self, and while not ignoring a mother's influence, still successfully shrugging off a smothering faux maternal blanket. She tempers the need for personal identity and individuality, however, with serenely personal vignettes, such as "Night Out," which gives a sweetly sentimental window into a childhood kept previously private.
Where her previous work has been raw, this collection is the refined product. Archetypal of Lazarus Flower's holistic portrait of Stewart's total persona, is "Tears Make Gentle Rain" - truly Stewart has found a new voice ... or unearthed a far-too long, buried, clarion call which has never sung so clearly. This new dialogue is with Stewart as artist, not Stewart as seeking to put a face on illness, and she achieves the goal with fluid grace. Each poem effortlessly stands alone as a brisk gem, yet the whole creating a brilliant treasure, Lazarus Flower is a seductive, haunting and haunted gift of intelligence, spirit, and soul, and all readers should be left craving, is more.
R. Andrew Brown is a writer, patient rights advocate, spiritualist, and has been teaching English rhetoric and speculative fiction at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for a decade.
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North Carolina Poet Finds New Voice