By Wally Swist
“To realize what is right in front of us all the time, and for us not to fully appreciate it, is just part of the gift of the legacy of Neruda’s odes, and among their nourishment we discover the astonishment of the awareness of living.”
By Wally Swist
“Almost no translation of “Lullaby” has disappointed me, but I have never found those translations adequate or fully accommodating of the rhythms, images, and lyrics that I felt, saw, and heard in the poetry.”
By Wally Swist
“For a poet who is also considered to be an aphorist, and who was a friend and colleague of Antonio Porchia, a master of the form, the poetry of Juarroz is more substantive than what is an oversimplification of his style and form.”
By Wally Swist
The Hyakunin Isshu can be translated as “one hundred poets (or people), one poem.” It is one of the several venerable anthologies of Japanese poetry. The Hyakunin was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), and the first full-color edition was published in 1775.
Review by Wally Swist
Early on in reading Michael Simms’ new novel, Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy, I heard a tone so distinct that I realized I hadn’t heard in years– that being one of true satire.
Review by Wally Swist
Poetic Dynamism, Higher Consciousness, and the Lyric Voice
In considering Diane Frank’s most recent publication, While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, what may be most ostensible is not just this poet’s irrepressible lyricism but an imagistic lyricism embedded with what Robert Bly called “the deep image.”
By Wally Swist
I want to offer my appreciation of Clarence Wolfshohl’s Coal Mine Landscape and Armadillos & Groundhogs and a few other of my neighbors, both lovely letterpress books bearing his master craftsman’s stamp of quality.
Review by Wally Swist
“before daylight touches the hill the backs of the wild geese:”
If the spiritual maxim about finding what is large in what is small and what is small in what is large can be applied to paul m.’s new book of haiku, witness tree, then “The Big Elm” in the “Agawam Meadows” serves as a metaphor not only for what is perhaps most significant regarding not only m.’s haiku but the art of haiku itself.
Wally Swist reviews The Dry Bones by Paul Chambers
The Dry Bones is Paul Chambers’ third book of haiku poetry, and it is published in a limited edition of only forty numbered and signed copies by The Red Ceilings Press (53 High Street, New Mills, Derbyshire SK22 4BR Wales).
By Wally Swist
I first read Giuseppe Ungaretti in translation in the early 1970s when I picked up his Selected Poems in the Penguin Modern European Poets Series translated by Patrick Creagh. As is my tradition, every autumn I return to a writer’s work that I prized when I was a young man.
Review by Wally Swist
The anecdote of Joseph Campbell’s seems apt regarding my carrying Art Beck’s Etudes: A Rilke Recital in my shoulder bag for some months, especially this second winter of Coronavirus, with Art Beck’s Rilke translations acting as a beneficent constellation of guiding stars.
Review by Wally Swist
Towards the end of his watershed book, The Angled Road: Collected Poems, 1970-2020, Jonas Zdanys writes in the poem, “Love,” that “Our lives” are “a vigil/ for something whiter/ than snow,” which represents Zdanys as a reverential poet, one whose reverence is that of the harmony of the intellect and the heart (as in the compassion exhibited in the fourth chakra).
Review by Wally Swist
It is apt that one of the several quotes from a variety of notable authors prefacing David Breeden’s The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet would include the French philosopher Alain Badiou, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, who writes about such concepts as truth not being either postmodern or a simple repetition of the concept of modernity, and whose philosophy just may be expressed succinctly by the quote used here, “Justice does not exist, which is why we must create it.”
Reviewed by Wally Swist
The title of James B. Nicola’s recent collection of 88 poems references a phrase from the imminent American lyrical poet, Theodore Roethke, “My desire’s a wind trapped in a cave.” How eponymously apt it is, since it mirrors the poems that Nicola offers us—as scrolls unwound in the air.
Review by Wally Swist
I first came across the poetry of Art Beck while working as a cataloguer in an all-poetry bookstore in 1977. Hugh Miller, Bookseller was located on Crown Street in New Haven.
Among my many favorite books of poetry in translation, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Robert Bly’s translation of the “first modern Norwegian poet,” Rolf Jacobsen’s The Roads Have Come to an End Now, and Edmund Keeley’s and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, there is a new addition: Art Beck’s translation of the Roman poet Martial (40 A.D.-104 A.D.) in a unique and refreshing selection just published by Shearsman Books, in England.
By Wally Swist
I have been rereading Garden Time, W. S. Merwin’s latest collection and thought it best to share some notes about the book I made. Did you notice that there are no publication acknowledgments in the book?