Books by Todd Swift

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.

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.

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