E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to tha...

Todd Swift on Leah Fritz 's New & Selected Poems from Salmon There are a number of Americans who have come to London over the past 100 or so years, and made an impact - one thinks of Robert Frost, Eliot, Pound , and then later, Donaghy .  Today, there are a good dozen excellent American expat poets who mainly publish in the UK, and are better known, sometimes, here than "back home" - Liane Strauss, Kathryn Maris, Tamar Yoseloff , Katy Evans Bush , Ruth Fainlight , and Leah Fritz, come to mind. Fritz is a very interesting instance of this expatriation.  Before she moved to London in the mid-80s, in her 50s, she had been a very vocal and visible member of the feminist movement in America, based for a time in New York, writing articles and books in the 60s and 70s. For instance, Andrea Dworkin 's great work, Intercourse , is dedicated to Fritz.  Fritz's archives are at Duke University.  When she settled near Sylvia Plath 's final flat, in Primrose Hil...

There are several strands of Irish poetry criticism by practitioners worth reading - one thinks of the serious Heaney essays, the playful, Quixotic Muldoon ones, and then those by a variety of more experimental Irish poets.  And then there is the Kevin Higgins essay.  Unlike any other poet-critic in Ireland, Higgins is now virtually unique, also, in the UK, for his prose style and approach.  Higgins, a very good, and clever, poet, is always lucid, straightforward, honest, to the point of bluntness, and funny; that he is also politically concerned without being (anymore) a fanatic is a plus.  He has modelled himself, clearly, on Orwell - but Orwell was not a poet.   Sean O'Brien comes to mind, or perhaps Randall Jarrell , but Higgins is not as dandyish as the latter, or as partial as the former.   Mentioning The War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011  from Salmon, is therefore a welcome book, because it gathers together scattered hack work and puts it...

Miss Del Rey Exercising Lana Del Rey , now a meme of sorts, is this year's Lady Gaga - a heretofore unknown young woman rising from obscurity to instant world fame, thanks to Turner Prize-style art hijinks, and Madonnaesque reinvention; we are living in an era when Walter Pater and Walter Mitty have married and given birth to girls with the nous of Orson Welles and Oscar Wilde yoked together with virulence - call them Odette Weldes . What is amazing is how the media gets so excited about a transformation whose blueprint is now at least 120 years old; after all, we now know how to burn with a gemlike flame; and all about personae and making strange.  Anyway, here comes Lana.  Her name refers to an O'Hara poem in my mind as well as a star.  She was born in New York State, so she is a New York School character, in a sense, though she prefers to position herself somewhere between High School Confidential and Blue Velvet .  Much has been made of the Lynchian i...

James Christopher Sheppard reviews Born This Way by Lady Gaga; and recants his earlier opinion... At last, after months of ultra-hype, Born This Way , the brand new Lady Gaga album, has arrived. Let’s see if it lives up to the expectations. ‘Marry The Night’ Straight into a haunting melodic club track, Gaga sets the pace for the album in style. This is a great song to bridge the gap between The Fame Monster to Born This Way , showing evolution in sound, but playing to Gaga’s strengths. ‘Marry the Night’ eases you into the new album with a soft start, but that quickly turns into those hammering beats Gaga has been promising for months. ‘Born This Way’ The title track and first single, which went on to become Gaga’s biggest hit in the USA, was met with controversial comparisons to Madonna ’s ‘Express Yourself’. While it is less edgy to her previous headline grabbing singles, ‘Born This Way’ seems to have established itself as THE guilty pleasure. You shouldn’t love it, but eventu...

The Boxer Rebellion are that most loathed of things - a mainstream indie band - who arrive, fully formed, like Topsy, sounding - according to various critics, like a suitable melange of Coldplay, Radiohead , and, yes, David Gray - as well, as (perhaps alarmingly), often as falsettoish as A-ha .   The Cold Still , is, for all that, a very good album (the for all that being its latent mediocrity) - though well-made pop-rock in the Kings of Leon vein is not all bad at all. Though I agree with The Replacements that putting a foot wrong makes the song work more authentically, there's a pleasure to be had in the manipulative sonic entertainments The Boxer Rebellion offers here.  I am not sure what will happen to them, but they could break the States big.  I do love "Step Out of the Car" as a phrase to use for a song title - the video being curiously homoerotic in a rather non-descript way.  The lead singer is, from the looks of things, movie star handsome.  That...

What's with it with book reviews?  Either they are timid, or puffery, or daggers drawn, or umbrellas tipped with poison, or - well. they are rarely subtle, complex, and objective, that's for darn sure.  Anyway, a few have been making the news, or been in the air, these last weeks.  Robert Potts , the critic, scholar and editor, reviewed Don Paterson 's Rain , from Faber, with rigorous glee, in the TLS .  It was a carefully researched rethink that showed the Scotsman obsessed with doppelgangers, twins and the shadow self (a long tradition started by RL Stevenson ) was basically like a member of Spinal Tap .  Perhaps reviewers should drop Spinal Tap references - they have become a little tired.  They tend to turn reviews up to 11 a little too easily.  Still, this Pottsian revisionism was noteworthy for being an openly dissenting view - most sentient reviewers kow-tow to Paterson as if he were a little god fallen from the heavens onto Gilligan's Island. ...

Poetry London Spring 2010 No. 65 - among many other interesting things - includes a review of the Oxfam DVD Asking A Shadow To Dance , directed by Jennifer Oey , produced by Martin Penny , with 35 poets selected by yours truly. The reviewer, TS Eliot-prize winner, Philip Gross , says, "the project does good service both to Oxfam and to poetry." Also reviewed is my debut British collection, Mainstream Love Hotel , from tall-lighthouse (2009). Julia Bird , Salt poet and good egg, argues that "Swift's poems become truly spirited and involving" when the experimental and lyric fuse, and spots the "verbal refractions" that either "illuminate or merely dazzle" and notes the "skilled and deliberate" formal structuring of the collection. She singles out the poem 'Green Girl in Vermont' for being "endlessly re-readable". Read it for yourself.

Todd Swift reviews Identity Parade edited by Roddy Lumsden Poetry anthologies are like beds: the most interesting question is who is and isn’t in them. Roddy Lumsden’s monumental Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) is a long-awaited generational summing up from one of the UK’s most active poet-editor-organisers. Lumsden, a master formalist, and crafty word-player, has mentored many younger poets for over a decade, and knows the mainstream British poetry world like few other practitioners. The anthology features 85 poets – and, in pluralist fashion – they represent a variety of styles and linguistic approaches, from performance poetry to the well-made lyric. There are also a few “experimental” poets included (such as Richard Price ), and the Introduction is more or less unique among such enterprises for being not editorially bellicose but open. It is also notable – and this extends Bloodaxe’s long-term dedication to women poets – that there are more women tha...

The recent statement made by Tarantino in London that violence is what the cinema is for and about, will not surprise either his detractors or fans, though it is a sad aesthetic limitation; I suspect it is a red rag to a bull or red herring: QT's work is as verbal and musical as it is visual. Indeed, if he ever makes a non-violent film (well) he can rest on his laurels. I find it intriguing that two of the best American films of the year are violent Westerns by other names - Basterds by QT and The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow . QT's film is a contrast to the Iraq bomb disposal film in almost every way: one is comedic, falsifies history, and flamboyantly cinematic; the other is tragic, attempts to be cinema verite, and uses documentary style - but both are about bands of wild (and less wild) American soldiers fighting on the margins of the acceptable. The Hurt Locker is one of my favourite films in a long time, mainly for how its main character mushrooms from villain to en...

Tom Chivers - poet and unstoppable force for poetic good in the UK - has started up a new magazine - literary and for the digital age, called Hand + Star . It is already looking to be one of the places readers wanting to keep up with the increasingly exciting New Decade of British Poetry will turn.

Contra , the second album from Vampire Weekend , hardly needs a blasting or a blessing from Eyewear ; in a time of vampires, their counterintuitive blend of Graceland era world music and preppieish pop is top fang. They're now seriously big in a fresh indie way that The Strokes could not sustain. I recall their debut as an utterly beautiful spring of new joy. It was also arch and subtextually ironic. Contra continues the buried lyric references to military history (especially failed rebellions), and architecture, while keeping the songs mainly surface-level about love and privileged youth (as in the song "Diplomat's son"). Musically, the ten clean songs here are, if anything, an improvement- better produced, more complex and a teensy bit more varied. Still, the band's leitmotif is rich uniformity- the cover design of their new album is almost identical to their last- so the songs are almost identically upbeat and as fun as first time out. The image of contradict...

Rufo Quintavalle reviews White Magic and Other Poems by Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski was born in 1921 and died in the Warsaw uprising in 1944 leaving behind him a substantial body of poetry, very little of which, up until now, has been translated into English. This book, a selection of his poems in a bilingual edition seeks to remedy this lack. The book is translated by Bill Johnston , Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University, and is published by Green Integer. The claims made by Johnston in his introduction that Baczynski should rank alongside Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska as one of the giants of 20 th Century Polish poetry do him no favours. He is not (at least in translation) on a par with these poets. Better to consider him on his own terms, if we can, or failing that, to grant him the indulgence we would any poet who died at the age of 23. Excesses of religiosity, lyricism, grandiosity and morbidity – all ...

‘The Terrors’ is, by nature, a mysterious book. Even the preface, in which the sequence is introduced as ‘a series of imagined emails to inmates at Newgate Prison between […] 1700 and 1760’, is far from explanatory. However, what might seem an overly complex book is shown by attentive reading to be an engaging, if not always immediately understandable, work of linguistic playfulness and incisive satire. It is, perhaps, the juxtaposition of such a contemporary form of discourse as the email with the style of the 18th century Newgate Calendar which throws up the most questions. In some quarters it is felt that since email has, in many ways, usurped snail mail we might one day, as Michael Ravitch envisages*, appreciate the email as a literary form rather than just a means to the end of relaying a message. The opening poem ‘A Guide to Email Etiquette’ serves as an orientation to the world the reader is about to enter as well as an introduction to the tropes at work in the book as a whole: ...

A New Hybrid Muse Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond , ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar , New York and London : Norton, 2008. ISBN: 9780393332384. Pbk, 734pp. Language for a New Century begins with a question about the meaning and value of poetry. Yet in this anthology, the question of value acquires all the more meaning, because the poetry comes out of postcolonial and diasporic settings. In their preface, the editors suggest that ‘Where the opportunities for fatal destruction, between people and between nations, are intensified, the same age-old questions still exist: What is the role of poetry? What can it do ? Can poetry still matter?’. What this anthology offers is a poetry attuned to needs of particular cultures. It is a poetry that works for these needs, by reinventing form, syntax, the lyric mode and themes such as childhood, identity, politics, war, homeland, spirituality and the body. The writers included or...

The Sentinel by A.F. Moritz The Sentinel’s title poem emphasises the lonely plight of the one who waits, in the dark, poised between enemy fire ahead and friendly encampment at one’s back. American-born, Canadian-based poet A.F. Moritz, surely mindful of cultural and other borders, implies such a position is even more that of the poet, pressured to “innovate” into the absence ahead, but lapped by the traditional what-has-been always pressing at his ear. Either way, one is somewhat damned – poems thrown too-forward are not deemed reliable reports of future incursions, and if one becomes too comfortable, straining to make out the shadows, the accusation is worse, of sleep or sloth. As such, this collection seems a noble attempt to ride on the sounds of the past (mainly the modern moment of the first half of the 20th century), while gesturing at contemporary diction, and detail, from time to time. The collection consists of 63 poems, divided into three sections, “Better Days”, “In A Pr...

I've been reviewing for Books in Canada over the past three or four years. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet, those persons not based in Canada, or able to secure a subscription, can access many of the reviews online (by others, as well). The typography is a little off - dashes appear as gobbledygook - but otherwise, it is all coherent. For instance, my review of the controversial Paterson and Simic anthology of British poetry that was published a few years back, or that anthology of Irish poetry, Breaking The Skin . There's also something on a recent collection of essays by Al Alvarez . I am most proud of my review of the Welles book by Simon Callow .