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.
