Todd Swift is the Orson Welles of contemporary poetry - pioneering, charismatic,
mischievous, irrepressible. This Selected displays the full range of his
manifold gifts; it is sure to win for him a host of fresh admirers. - Mark Ford
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If you are new, as I was, to the poems of Todd Swift you will find a feast of moods and modes in his fantastic batch of selected poems. This collection displays an amazing poetic breadth bounding from popular culture to religion to family. Elegiac, whimsical, meditative—The Ministry of Emergency Situations is a cornucopia of resonant songs and insights. Todd Swift is a revelation. - Terrance Hayes
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Todd Swift’s energetic and seemingly inexhaustible imagery drives his poems to the exquisite edge of distraction. The disconcertingly ingenious seascape of this variegated collection is shot through with startling and quotable insights like empathetic islands, like koans. Donne and Ashbery, Marvell and O'Hara all preside at the feast of this generous poetic imagination. —Annie Finch
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Todd Swift wears his erudition lightly, even playfully, particularly in his deft use of form and rhyme, and in the sly, insightful way he combines allusions to popular culture and classical tales. But of equal importance to the considerable technique deployed here is the poet’s tenderhearted, searchingly ethical voice. Swift displays an acute, sometimes painful sensitivity to the world — as in the marvelous “The Influence of Anxiety at the Seaside with Tea” — as he records the precise details that reveal our virtues and our flaws, or in other words, make us human. This collection, spanning three decades, should solidify this fine poet’s international reputation. - Rose Solari
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What a real pleasure to read a book containing 30 years of work by a poet I thought I knew well, and to discover something entirely new, a different sensuality, a different tonal shift, a different musical texture, on every other page or so. Yes, I knew already that Todd Swift is a master of many poetic dimensions: he can be lyrical and meditative, playful and ironic, he can stand up to the inevitable and also cast a spell on it, woo it into language which is his secret, his private music, his unashamed public tenderness, his joy, his moment of grief. And, yet, again, how can one not be incited by Swift’s political passions, his hilarities, his many portraits of others– from famous public figures, both real and imaginary, to poet’s parents (both real and imaginary?). How can one not fall in love with these echoes of Larkin in the 21st century Canada and these very British forays into Canadian fiction? But most of all you will love his dualities, his uncertainties, that very moment when you realize that “‘God has left us like a girl’ / She has gone, out of the house / And down the stairs, her scent / Evident and sweet as lilacs, / Shaping her descent in the air, / Leaving us alone to pray.”’ Go ahead, open this book on the poem called “Michael Kohlhaas” and you will want to buy straight away. Because the poem is brilliant. Because Todd Swift is the real thing. - Ilya Kaminsky
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Readers will delight in reading The Ministry of Emergency Situations, Todd Swift’s Selected Poems. Here is a poet growing every year more surely into his own: his poems are becoming more lyrical, more sure-footed, and more wry in their insights and descriptions. These are learned, interesting poems in a breathtaking variety of forms and modes. - Patricia Clark
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If you are new, as I was, to the poems of Todd Swift you will find a feast of moods and modes in his fantastic batch of selected poems. This collection displays an amazing poetic breadth bounding from popular culture to religion to family. Elegiac, whimsical, meditative—The Ministry of Emergency Situations is a cornucopia of resonant songs and insights. Todd Swift is a revelation. - Terrance Hayes
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Todd Swift writes about humans underneath their skins. On the surface these
poems engage with Goethe, The Fantastic Four, Charlotte Rampling and the detritus
of contemporary life; but these things are portals through which the poetic
lines access the ethereal connections between beings. These poems are the magic
tendrils that emerge when one person reaches for another: they grip hard, and
then dissipate into a magician’s puff of smoke. - James Franco
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Todd Swift’s energetic and seemingly inexhaustible imagery drives his poems to the exquisite edge of distraction. The disconcertingly ingenious seascape of this variegated collection is shot through with startling and quotable insights like empathetic islands, like koans. Donne and Ashbery, Marvell and O'Hara all preside at the feast of this generous poetic imagination. —Annie Finch
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There's a completion, a dire prophecy seemingly come
true, in Todd Swift's The Ministry of Emergency Situations: Selected Poems
1983-2013. The brief, incisive first poem, "Shape", sees how the body forms
and limits: "Our shape shapes us // ...like entrails / ...the curse." Poems at
the end, from Swift's powerful recent volume When All My Disappointments Came
at Once, grapple with the discovery of a devastating bodily shaping:
infertility. Between are riches in manifold registers--lyrics, narratives,
eruptions of wit, tributes to ideas and writers and moments, narratives--all
full of restless rhythms, creative diction, and a mastery of technique,
especially impressive in the many poems which bring new sounds to the tradition
of rhyme and meter. The book finally is an account of the unfinished overcoming
of the limits it finds all around and within us. Music may have lied in
promising the eternal, as Swift remarks in "Mix Tapes". But he creates a music
of language in which nature can perhaps be what we say it is, because the
seeming permanence of a tree watched throughout a day "suggests to me a kind of
love" ("Natural Curve"). - A.F. Moritz
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Todd Swift wears his erudition lightly, even playfully, particularly in his deft use of form and rhyme, and in the sly, insightful way he combines allusions to popular culture and classical tales. But of equal importance to the considerable technique deployed here is the poet’s tenderhearted, searchingly ethical voice. Swift displays an acute, sometimes painful sensitivity to the world — as in the marvelous “The Influence of Anxiety at the Seaside with Tea” — as he records the precise details that reveal our virtues and our flaws, or in other words, make us human. This collection, spanning three decades, should solidify this fine poet’s international reputation. - Rose Solari
---
What a real pleasure to read a book containing 30 years of work by a poet I thought I knew well, and to discover something entirely new, a different sensuality, a different tonal shift, a different musical texture, on every other page or so. Yes, I knew already that Todd Swift is a master of many poetic dimensions: he can be lyrical and meditative, playful and ironic, he can stand up to the inevitable and also cast a spell on it, woo it into language which is his secret, his private music, his unashamed public tenderness, his joy, his moment of grief. And, yet, again, how can one not be incited by Swift’s political passions, his hilarities, his many portraits of others– from famous public figures, both real and imaginary, to poet’s parents (both real and imaginary?). How can one not fall in love with these echoes of Larkin in the 21st century Canada and these very British forays into Canadian fiction? But most of all you will love his dualities, his uncertainties, that very moment when you realize that “‘God has left us like a girl’ / She has gone, out of the house / And down the stairs, her scent / Evident and sweet as lilacs, / Shaping her descent in the air, / Leaving us alone to pray.”’ Go ahead, open this book on the poem called “Michael Kohlhaas” and you will want to buy straight away. Because the poem is brilliant. Because Todd Swift is the real thing. - Ilya Kaminsky
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Readers will delight in reading The Ministry of Emergency Situations, Todd Swift’s Selected Poems. Here is a poet growing every year more surely into his own: his poems are becoming more lyrical, more sure-footed, and more wry in their insights and descriptions. These are learned, interesting poems in a breathtaking variety of forms and modes. - Patricia Clark
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From Goethe and Walter Benjamin to Penthouse and the Fantastic Four, from
tender family memory to the realization that he doesn’t carry a gun because “it
fits perfectly/into a mouth,” from the kinky world of Charlotte Rampling to a
quest for God as sincere as Eliot’s or Robert Lowell’s—Todd Swift is a poet with
range. He’s an expat who knows
loneliness, a big city man who knows crowds, enough of a formalist to know how
to work a rhyme, enough of a modernist to know when not to. As Johnny Mathis said in life, and says in
one of Todd Swift’s poems: wonderful,
wonderful… - Robert Archambeau
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Todd Swift's The Ministry of Emergency Situations: Selected Poems 1983-2013 is a monumental collection.
Swift's touch is light, but there's a formidable tension between his elegant
lines and the world of utter contingency they disclose. The breadth of the
palette is compelling; the playful, or not so playful, contagion of identity
in "Julian," the visceral dispossession of "Sonnet." "Somewhere the mimetic is
having more fun than I am, " Swift writes, and his poems can share the sheen and
hypnotic silence of oblique mirrors; a disingenous gaze, a flash of undoing.The Ministry of Emergency Situations: Selected Poems 1983-2013 is a disquieting delight, an excellent
introduction to an important poet.- D. Nurkse
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Thank goodness for Todd Swift. He is one of a
handful of contemporary poets who dive into the uncharted and risky regions:
loss, pain, recovery with no pretense of disguise but with undeniable
astuteness and vigor. These are risky endeavors. As we look to poetry for these
thing, it is diametrically replenishing to read a poet who confronts the abyss
and returns with a language that suggests something worth our eyes, our ears,
our hearts. “Her ring slipped off her finger...” It is a gift that we can
accompany these poems to the challenging but beautiful places they go. - James Grinwis
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The Canadian-English poet Todd Swift notes, eating a lobster, "armistice beneath
/ the armour"; he sees and deftly alliterates: "cold champagne cascading / over
wide glasses at a wedding"; and he brings a North American casual stylishness to
meet a courteous London precision with rhyme and meter. As his interests are
broad and his eye sharp and his ear clever, his quotidian poems are rich and
strange. His sense of humour is a dry as a perfect martini -- he puts Goethe in
a hot-air balloon, for example -- and he is not afraid to drown in words. His
lists are like novels, and his dreams seem like reality, only more so. Lose
yourself in his poetry, now. - John Tranter
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To travel through the seasons and topographies of Todd Swift’s poetry is to share in his celebration of the union of insistent music and enigmatic image. We may read The Ministry of Emergency Situations as the unfolding memoir of a poetic self crafted from a rich diversity of encounter with other selves and their migratory histories, whether in the street, the library, the museum, the cinema hall, or across the rusted boundary markers of vanished countries. Swift’s poems combine a taste for daring conceptual experiment with a passion for the sight, smell, heft and texture, the ‘lustrous ephemera’ of everyday experience. These poems claim our fullest attention as beautifully crafted objects on the page; at the same time, they are quickened by the compelling vibrancy of the spoken voice. - Ranjit Hoskote
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