Four Incarnations
Now in its 2nd printing!
HANNAH
Her third eye is strawberry jam
has a little iris in it
her eyelids
are red
she’s sleepy
and the milk
has gone down
the wrong way.
I’ve just had breakfast
with the smallest person in the world.
From Publishers Weekly
Introducing
these poems, Sward writes that in 1966 he was "hit by a speeding MG"
and lost his memory for 24 hours. Curiously though, Sward's poems, even
prior to his accident, manifest a kind of amnesiac's perspective on the
world. Many poems in Kissing the Dancer discover an alarming novelty in
experience using a child's syntax.
In "The Kite," a woman who has just hung herself is described as, simply, "skypaper, way up / too high to pull down." In "At Jim McConkey's Farm," Sward's unusual takes on reality evoke a Zen-like calm. "Overwhelmed by the complexities of skunk cabbage," the poem's speaker suddenly realizes that "at this moment / for this day even, we have belonged here."
At times Sward's technique gives his poems a disorienting
and diffuse quality: "children screaming and feeling slighted / The
next minute we're walking along canals on the planet Mars." In two
inventive new poems, however, Sward's style is at its best. "Basketball's
the American Game Because It's Hysterical" uses the sport to discuss
poetic prosody, and "On My Way to the Korean War . . ." depicts
the levitation of "2,000 battle-ready troops."
- Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review
Sward can handle not only a Lardner-Hemingway back room kind of American
speech, but the attitudes that betray it. He can also describe odd-ball
birds not found in Audubon with the mosaic deftness of Marianne Moore.
Carolyn Kizer
Here is Robert Sward, now in his fifties, 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.
William Meredith
Like other good works of art, these poems have the air of having been made
for people rather than for other artists.
Harvard Review
Humorous...satiric... The best poems are exuberant, often surreal, jammed
with ideas and images; they exude energy.
Limited time only! Buy a signed copy of Robert's latest collection.