New & Selected Poems
1957-2011
“Here is Robert Sward, now in
his seventies, still fresh, ingenuous, and funnier than ever. His life--and
what a life--is an open book. You can read all about it here. What's more, you
will want to call your friends and read poems to them over the phone. I know,
I've done it.”
-- Carolyn Kizer on Four Incarnations
"...fierce,
new-minted and convincing...he has a voice and a range."
-- New York Times Book Review on Kissing the Dancer.
New and
Selected is culled from
Robert Sward's newest and best works, including both previously unpublished
poems and selections from his 20+ books of poetry. It is the definitive Sward
collection, exhibiting his outwardly zany and fanciful, inwardly serious,
troubled and questioning poems. They cover the territory Sward has tread so
well--love, divorce, multiple marriages, aging, loss, and the challenge of bringing
up children in a highly unstable world--in his lifelong search for the
liberating illumination of IT.
-Red Hen Press
ISBN-13 978-1-59709-261-6
$24.95
www.redhen.org
God is in the Cracks 2nd printing
“The heart and core of this book is a series of dramatic monologues and
dialogues between father and son.
The irrepressible aliveness and
weird wisdom of the father-son series should win it a lasting place in the
literature of our day.”
--Robyn Sarah, The Globe & Mail
Garrison Keillor reads
title poem on Writer's Almanac
More
about God is in the Cracks
Purchase Signed Edition - Limited time only
The Collected Poems 2nd printing
“By turns humorous and serious, ecstatic
and perplexed, he is always fanciful, lively and life-affirming.
Sward's Collected Poems is
that most unusual thing in contemporary poetry: a good-humored, gregarious and
heartfelt book, abundantly human and unfeigned.”
-- Robyn Sarah, The Globe & Mail
More
about The Collected Poems
Purchase
Signed Edition - Limited time only
To Be Published 2012
The Dogs in My Life
Cover art by Jim Aschbacher
“Prone to barking myself, I felt right at home. Enjoyable in the moment,
the poems continue to reverberate with a much- needed wisdom.”
-- Ellen Bass
“In the animal poems there is a
bravery in the face of our limitations, a warmth for our absurdities, a way of
life to be gleaned from our failings and ineptitudes...a self-critique that
turns our 'freakishness' into an ironic source of fulfillment and
transcendence.”
-- The Carleton Miscellany