Bücher von Brian Swann

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.

In his first fiction collection in many years, Swann has widened his scope to include "short fiction, longer fiction, non-fiction, prose-poems, memoirs, essays etc.," which Harold Jaffe has called "succinct and precisely refined by a poet of a high order writing nuanced prose. One has to read closely and more than once to get the meaning and feel the rhythms," and Andrei Codrescu has said that "Brian Swann has tailored an elegant suit of a variety of threads. It's on my A list of the blooming philosophical hybrids of the last decade." Jackson Lears notes that "Brian Swann's forays into prose-poetry and fiction are venturesome, witty, delightfully understated and frequently compelling," and John Allman writes that "the self discovered in this visionary collection of speculations, narratives and prose-poems will be not only the author's but also the reader's. There is no way to rush through this book. Every page gives you something to ponder or admire, be it theoretical physics or aesthetics or prose poem or something historic, like the rendering of the fin de siècle transition into the post-modern. In many ways we're shown how looking forward is not too different from looking behind, since reality, the world, is non-linear, built on simultaneities. Dogs on the Roof is a thoughtful, exciting companion. Everyone should have a copy nearby."