Reviews
[Brian Swann's] work enables us to begin to understand a world which is not merely a reflection of our anxieties and desires, but which is truly different in the signals it sends to us through other people and other entities.
D. H. Lawrence’s feeling for families and Basil Bunting’s precision meet in these poems 'sharp as chipped chert or fer de lance.' A postwar English childhood and Catskill seasonal inventories frame a wiry, impish, affecting life review, rhythmically akin to the Italian poetry Swann has translated, and marking a personal summit. 'The mountain is a pattern that whirls.'
This various and vital collection in which articulate engagement with the sensual stuff of the natural world coexists with philosophic riffs on the meaning of night scents, stars, fireflies, and even family history is a brave, various, adventurous book that reveals with the tang of clear, immediate speech a poet in the fully earned maturity of his powers.
Brian Swann is a magnificent poet. His new book, In Late Light, is striking for its largeness. He discovers universal truths in a bird’s call, or in a remembered family scene, and he makes us perceive them as well. His style is lyrical, passionate yet restrained, immensely knowledgeable and yet attuned to common speech and always revelatory of the human heart.
Book Details
I. Temenos
Worlds
In Line
Rocks
This Place
Transubstantiation
Temenos
The Garden
As If
Click Song
For an Anonymous Thrush
A Typology of Birds
II. Opening the Dark
Hathor
Moonlight
Peel
Land of Flint
Correspondences
Ope
I. Temenos
Worlds
In Line
Rocks
This Place
Transubstantiation
Temenos
The Garden
As If
Click Song
For an Anonymous Thrush
A Typology of Birds
II. Opening the Dark
Hathor
Moonlight
Peel
Land of Flint
Correspondences
Opening the Dark
Pity Me
Old Men
Lily
Mangoes
Moth
Repayment
Ghost Image
The Amazon
The Knife
The Obsidian Mirror
Beyond
The Drowned Boy
Night sky with Figures
The Stranger
III. Ghost Dance
Grandfather Clock
The Pit
Rag and Bone
Time Saver
Floating
Light
The Lake
Identity
The Waves
Ghost Dance
Strange Flowers
Longinus on the Bowery
Loneliness
Tropical Fish
Firmament
Over the Moon
IV. Making It Out
The Rill
The Gods
The Whistlet and His Dog
The Feather
Making It Back
Making It Out
Strangeness
The Horses
The Cricket
The Sky
How I Understand Eternity
Tableau
Magdalenian
Masks
Cetus
Acknowledgments