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England is Mine
England is Mine, Todd Swift's seventh collection of poems, takes on the foreign coolness, tone and lingo of London in the present, while the poet's Montreal past arrives in waves of defiance, solace and reverie. In poems that demonstrate Swift's abilities as a poet to out-move The Movement (out bicycle-clip Larkin), on the one hand, and revive the British Revival, on the other, this collection pushes old, droll Mr. Poetic Persona to the brink of discovering an urgent, idealistic youthful self within. Public, intimate, clever, and heartbreakingly sad, the poems in England is Mine reveal a poet at the height of his engagement with the lyric idiom.
Rue Du Regard
Todd Swift is one of Canada's leading younger expatriate writers. Elegant, moving, and masterful, Rue du Regard forms the final part of a trilogy, following the acclaimed Budavox and Cafe Alibi. Written in Paris and London between 2001 and 2004, Rue du Regard crosses the channel between these two great cities and between two kinds of poetry: experimental and mainstream. The book deals with looking: in, out, back, and ahead. In almost whiplash motion, certain moods, themes, and images from Swift's earlier collections here snap forward, double-back. The universal accidents of travel and memory, love and desire, violence and innocence, are central.
Optician to the Stars
In OPTICIAN TO THE STARS, the British-Canadian Todd Swift, one of the leading poet-editors of his generation, takes a look at life with and without rose-tinted specs, considering the sublunar world in all its beauty and horror. The collection favours briefer, more epigrammatic poems, often composed on his iPhone while waiting for blood tests or unable to sleep. For the past two years have seen Swift survive a blood clot on his heart, and a life-changing diagnosis. Not a diary of disease and recovery, and never seeking easy epiphanies, the poems nevertheless unfold a tapestry of humane, witty, and often formally-delightful perceptions. From remembering poets who have died, to celebrating seeing a movie star from Mad Max: Fury Road cycling past, these are poems always seeking to see things, and say things, with craft, skill, elegance, and joy.
Café Alibi
Swiftís Budavox: poems 1990-1999 explored sex, violence, art, and memory, to critical acclaim. His new collection, CafÈ Alibi, written while the author lived abroad in Budapest and Paris, extends these concerns to include popular culture, history, desire, nostalgia, and the often competing claims of travel and home. Swiftís crisp, elegant, deceptively calm language questions images of 'the child, the adult and the outside world' in ways both witty and disturbing. CafÈ Alibi maps a stylish itinerary through exotic terrain, offering at once hostility and ultimate peace, poetry that puts love to the test and disarms our darkest fears. Critical Comment ìThis slim edition ... contains elegan...
Budavox
Todd Swift is one of the most exciting and eclectic young writers to emerge in Canada. Over the last years he has continuously explored new genres and themes, writing in a variety of styles, including work for television, film, radio, theatre, CD, spoken word and the printed page. He has also become recognized as one of North America's leading poetry activists and is involved internationally in the promotion of performance poets, through his various cabaret events and other related projects. As performer, writer, impresario and editor, (of the significant anthologies Map-Makers' colors: New Poets of Northern Ireland and Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poets), he has defined a new kind of cosmopolitan panache for the idea of the poet as key figure at the start of the new millennium.
Madness and Love in Maida Vale
Poetry. MADNESS AND LOVE IN MAIDA VALE celebrates Todd Swift's 50th birthday--and over 30 years of published poetry--in style, with new poems extending his striking range. Moving across religion, marital love, sexual desire, mental health, Maida Vale, and the vexing issue of poetry itself, the collection sustains, over long sequences and brief lyrics, a restless sense of achievement.
Winter Tennis
Todd Swift's fourth collection, "Winter Tennis" is a passionate appraisal of life by the poet at age forty. By turns elegantly sad and radically witty, the poems move between the wintry wilds of loss and the sun-splashed courts of word play and of language acts keenly observed. Also examined are the facts of our quickly eroding identities-life, love, and death. A series of powerful poems commemorates the poet's companionable father. Others vividly investigate erotic love, the odd marine passions of the Japanese Emperor, and, for its own sake, fine verbal whimsy. Everywhere is the insouciant slosh and splash of language-street level, poised, erudite. Winter Tennis confirms Swift as both an unruly literary rebel and master formalist, nourished by the full vocal range of English-language poetry.
Spring in Name Only
Poetry. SPRING IN NAME ONLY is Todd Swift's first full collection since his 2014 American Selected and marks the first with Black Spring Press. Responding to the age of Brexit and Covid-19, these are lyric modern poems that take their bearings from both Auden and Empson, F.T. Prince and Dylan Thomas-as such, they seek to explore the '40s style of heightened rhetoric, emotion and personal myth Swift has elsewhere celebrated, as in his edition of the Collected Tiller. Fusing irony and sincerity, confession and oratory, they build a bridge of eloquence, with which to address the key themes of Swift's now-36-year career as a published poet of international stature: fear of death, anxiety in life, faith, despair, love, desire, empathy and critique. No other contemporary poet is as willing to push language to the pitch of perverse stylishness, in the services of poetic majesty. Here springs a restorative fluency that raises the bar.
Dream-Beauty-Psycho
Poetry. DREAM-BEAUTY-PSYCHO is Todd Swift's latest trip to the world of desire and retro style, sometimes Lynchian in scope. Rhetorically wild at heart, these onrushing poems of religion, marriage, sex and phantasy establish Swift as one of the auteurs of contemporary English poetry. His 33- year-oeuvre is now, more than anything, its own cinematic universe of replicated tropes, fetishes, words and allusions. This could be a psychobiography dreamt up by Freud. Over it all looms the year 2016: the deaths of Bowie and Cohen, and Trump's rise but the crowning achievement here may be the poems celebrating recent books by Denise Riley and Derek Mahon, who each create a bridge of eloquence.
