Kirjahaku

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’.

In this work, Todd Swift pursues his exploration of how art, fantasy, and desire can console, or inflame, the heart – and how, against the vastly more powerful claims of reality, the imagination can do no more than offer its impulsive, fragile and poignant gifts. Love and lust, fear and trust, hope and despair are tangled.

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.

Opening Hours is the sequel to Todd Swift’s 2020 collection Spring In Name Only. The past year has been a time to think of the other, the self, the deadly baton, gun and contagion, the fragile, the toxic – what ends, what endures – the scientific, the mysterious, the numinous, the luminous, death, love, books, friends, brothers, mothers, others, masks, TV, music, food, sleep, walks, cats, fear, hope, and the environment, and how the seasons are more than background for a play, but sometimes the stage itself. These poems, at once freewheeling as song lyrics, but rigorously aware of the modern poets who spoke to the fraught decades of the 30s and 40s, take their bearings from both Dylans, and later Hill, while also essaying longer poems that, like Yeats, seek to locate complex truths in the fusion of rhetorical argument with symbolic, even ecstatic, imagination. The vulgar contemporary world of immediate image debates a more interior, stoic world, of contemplation, doubt, and renunciation. Souls struggle, but somehow, prove their existence in the act of self-questioning. The art of eloquence, polluted by actual fallen language, rebuilds a rickety bridge, outwards, and what matters is the repair, not the uncertain destination. For, this year of closures and openings that barely seem to ever take hold, must celebrate the fragile moment as much as any permanence. Poetry paradoxically becomes a defining aspect of a potentially radical and ever-shifting world, while offering a renewable cornerstone to whatever future civilization might intend to become.

Christmas 2021, Todd Swift was in ICU, close to death. His heart had failed. Now, in early 2022, he continues to be tested and treated at the Royal Free Hampstead for this serious health challenge, as he comes to terms with heart failure. He also has a very large blood clot on his heart. With a cover design by artist Edwin Smet, here are a selection of new and older poems, published as a fundraiser for Todd, who cannot currently work, or indeed, face anything much more stressful than an episode of Gardener's Question Time...