Bøker av Brian Swann

Here be divagations, wanderings through Covid-stricken Manhattan streets woven together with accounts and excursions through the mind's spaces, memories real and imagined, incidents and adventures comic and sad in a world off-kilter, a mix of marvelous and concrete, quotidian and outré all playing against a pandemic background of " Time, the chorus," now luxurious as prose-poem, now expansive as fiction or essay, sheltering in place or moving through landscapes foreign and domestic, all held together floating in nervous air while the mind tells stories like Scheherazade, trying to trick the tyrant into a change of heart and set us loose again to wander where the sun never sets and Ya-Honk! goes the wild gander. It's an amazing book. These prose meditations circle, engage, even deflect the looming presence and isolations of the Covid year. Swann's "emergent occasions" are vividly described city streets, domestic moments, dreams recalled or proposed and wonderfully angular, brief narratives. In their digressive qualities they recall Defoe's Journal, not as source but as precedent. Covid left us all with varied emptiness and arbitrary time. Swann offers us his effort to fill in the blanks. -Michael Anania ... chronicles the Covid-19 pandemic as dystopian sci-fi literature, capturing the uncertainty and fear through direct experience.... And then, as can happen, when the daily trappings of life are stemmed and a community is ordered to shelter in place, the writer extracts resources from his files-memory, imagination. In the fertile, isolated mind, in the storehouse of recall and creativity, the vignettes arise. Astute and conversational, Swann's fragments swirl swiftly from encounter to concept, from ordinary moment to momentary insight. -Martine Bellen ... Brian Swann tells us the Iroquois term "ononharoin" is the ceremony in which the brain is turned upside down, where you can only riddle to get what you want. His prose poems and fictions circle real-time memories ... to recreate the mysteries of one "who captures the blue in the prism all around" and "the noise the emptiness makes." The narrator finds maggots under the floormats in "The Other Side," a man "who strangles balloons into sausages" in "The Contortionist," and a penknife that animates a desk in "Ducks." Each piece is a kind of riddle, plunging into life and where they emerge is always a surprise. -Terese Svoboda

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.

In his first fiction collection in many years, Swann has widened his scope to include "short fiction, longer fiction, non-fiction, prose-poems, memoirs, essays etc.," which Harold Jaffe has called "succinct and precisely refined by a poet of a high order writing nuanced prose. One has to read closely and more than once to get the meaning and feel the rhythms," and Andrei Codrescu has said that "Brian Swann has tailored an elegant suit of a variety of threads. It's on my A list of the blooming philosophical hybrids of the last decade." Jackson Lears notes that "Brian Swann's forays into prose-poetry and fiction are venturesome, witty, delightfully understated and frequently compelling," and John Allman writes that "the self discovered in this visionary collection of speculations, narratives and prose-poems will be not only the author's but also the reader's. There is no way to rush through this book. Every page gives you something to ponder or admire, be it theoretical physics or aesthetics or prose poem or something historic, like the rendering of the fin de siècle transition into the post-modern. In many ways we're shown how looking forward is not too different from looking behind, since reality, the world, is non-linear, built on simultaneities. Dogs on the Roof is a thoughtful, exciting companion. Everyone should have a copy nearby."