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

Winter Tennis out of stock at Amazon.com!  Thanks Mike.  My sales report for 2011 will now make less soul-destroying reading!

Dear friends and supporters of Eyewear - it might sadden or amuse you to learn that my book from 2007, Winter Tennis , sold 0 copies this year.  Yes, that's right - 0.  I just got the news today in the form of a statement.  Sigh.  Well, there is one copy still in stock at Amazon.com - so, I ask you, out there, eyewearers, to buy "just one book" of mine this week, and move me from zero to hero when next year's sales report comes in.  Just think of the effect your purchase will instantly have on my morale.  And, besides, it is a very good book, if I do say so myself.  Also available direct from the publishers in Canada .

The summer 2008 issue of Poetry London is now out, featuring Pauline Stainer on the cover, and with reviews by, among others, Nathan Hamilton , Peter Robinson , Kathryn Maris , and Anne-Marie Fyfe . It also features new poems from Emily Berry , Canadian poet-novelist Steven Heighton , Polly Clark , and Chris Beckett - again, among others. Readers (especially those not based in the UK) would find a subscription to this lively, increasingly wide-ranging magazine would give them a pretty good idea of mainstream British poetry, which is recovering, thanks in no small part to the influx of younger and emerging poets over the last few years who have begun to get the logjams moving again. That being said, readers of Eyewear know, this wouldn't be Eyewear if I didn't mention a certain UK tendency to want monolinear utterance from the lyric, rather than the polysemous (let alone perverse) multiplicity of voices, and options, available. Winter Tennis (my collection published in Mon...

Dear me. A Montreal writer has got his hands on my latest collection , and found a whiff of the undergraduate about it. I'd suggest any critic who uses phrases like "dorm-room touches" has a bit of spring break fever themselves. Anyway, it's an interesting, violently mixed review. As the reviewer writes: "The voice which might have knit these elements together into a powerful whole seems, as yet, to lack confidence in what it is attempting to say." Well, yes, except what the poems are saying is that the idea of one voice, and one powerful whole, remains elusive, for poems, for texts - especially in bleak midwinter. However, the "excess" of reference to other authors in the collection (and other figures, in general, from Hirohito , to Brando ) was intentional, and valedictory. I happen to think allusion and homage are viable poetic tropes - and excess is also, at times, a literary option. Many conservative Montreal critics tend to want poetry to be ...

The Globe and Mail , Canada's leading national newspaper, reviews my 2007 collection, Winter Tennis , today, in its Saturday edition, along with other poets of interest.

Shameless plug time. My latest collection, Winter Tennis , was not published in the UK, and was thus not up for the Eliot Prize. Nor is it likely to be reviewed much, or at all, in Britain, though I live and work here. One of the challenges of being a Canadian poet in London. Anyway, Alberta is the new next big thing, and, fortunately, someone has noticed the book there . This is, as far as I can tell, the first and only review of WT, so far. Maurice Mierau writes that " Winter Tennis is an elegantly crafted book, and Swift is tuned in to the English language as a global inheritance in a way that more Canadian poets should be."

Autumn Tennis in Bloomsbury, Anyone? a reading by 6 younger poets and 2 special guests October 1, 7-9 pm Oxfam Bookshop, 12 Bloomsbury Street London WC1B 3QA The reading, in the Poetry Month of October, will feature 6 younger UK-based poets, who met at The Poetry School, and whose poems have begun to make an impact on the British literary scene. Readers are: Emily Berry, Joe Dunthorne, Kaethe Fine, Michael Kavanagh, Alex McRae & Helen Mort With special guests Joanne Limburg and Todd Swift Swift will give an exclusive UK reading from, and signing of, his latest collection, Winter Tennis (DC Books, Canada, 2007) Admission is free with a suggested donation of £5 to Oxfam. To secure your place please phone Alison Jackson on 020 7637 4610 or email