From Booklist
Swanger focuses on the strange beauty within sadness. Like an insomniac whose eyes adjust so well to the darkness that he sees every object clearly, Swanger has a particular talent for making ordinary occasions or possessions appear shadowy, more textured than they would in full illumination. An outing at the beach, for example, reveals the wonder of a grandfather making a rare swimming appearance and being watched with pensive curiosity by his "shorebound spawn." The title poem emphasizes Swanger's amazement at those who are able to awake unafraid, "as if everything important doesn't matter / and what's unfinished can be left whole." Whether describing "despair at noon" or a car with a quiet motor, he uses language that is concise and powerful, displaying tenderness and consideration in the depths of sadness. Elizabeth Gunderson
Review
The Aunts
Bar Mitzvah Boy's Lament
Birthday
Cow Tipping
Dinner With Jerry
Dispensable
Elissa Plays The Piano
Ending It
Hands
The Heart's Education
How Does Music Measure Time?
In The Cemetery With Lynn
In This World
Knob Pines
Laundry
The Limitations Of Light
Longer
Lover
Matinee
Middle-class Metaphysics
A Miner Describes His Death
Mistake
Oedipus Irvington
Oxford
The Past
Patriarch At The Lake
Photograph
Practice: Father And Son
Scar
She Marries A Violinist
Sloth: The Deadliest Sin
Something About Love
Style
Sycamores
These Hearts We Would Name Our Own
This Waking Unafraid
Two Faces
Two Stories
We Have Faced Night And Warmed Each Other
What The Wing Says
White-out
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Bar Mitzvah Boy's Lament
Birthday
Cow Tipping
Dinner With Jerry
Dispensable
Elissa Plays The Piano
Ending It
Hands
The Heart's Education
How Does Music Measure Time?
In The Cemetery With Lynn
In This World
Knob Pines
Laundry
The Limitations Of Light
Longer
Lover
Matinee
Middle-class Metaphysics
A Miner Describes His Death
Mistake
Oedipus Irvington
Oxford
The Past
Patriarch At The Lake
Photograph
Practice: Father And Son
Scar
She Marries A Violinist
Sloth: The Deadliest Sin
Something About Love
Style
Sycamores
These Hearts We Would Name Our Own
This Waking Unafraid
Two Faces
Two Stories
We Have Faced Night And Warmed Each Other
What The Wing Says
White-out
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
