       
 Budavox
...resounding praise from contemporaries and critics
New Review - November 24, 2003
"I like how Swift embodies so much of the Lebenswelt.
While I like many experimental poets, I find they tend
to lose the world so often, and what they offer in
exchange isn't always such a great trade. Poems like "Pierina
at Christmas" vacillate nicely between abstraction and
embodiment; I think that's a poem that W.C. Williams
would have enjoyed reading, and I think he's a good one
to cite as having found the via media Swift moves down
in Budavox." - W.B. Keckler
Nicole Blackman (poet/performer, author of Blood Sugar):
"Luminous, unexpected, lovely and unsettling, the images
resonate long after the poems have ended."
Regie Cabico (NY performance poet, co-editor Poetry
Nation):
"Swift's eerie verse transforms suspicion to the
lyrical. Kevin Spacey shakes hands with Catullus, savage
and gentlemanly. He concocts Eros and murder in the
sharp prisms of his imagination. The results: a
deliciously carnivorous and ironic language."
Derek Mahon (Irish poet, author of The Yellow Book):
"Swift is a voice for our times."
George Szirtes (British poet, author of Selected Poems,
Oxford University Press, 1996) :
"Swift's poems move between the familiar and exotic,
from the meditative through the speculative. His poetic
language too is on the move, from the crisp
tentativeness of Elizabeth Bishop to the outer suburbs
of Wallace Stevens and even, here and there, Ginsberg.
The intimate is always threatened: reality is challenged
by its myths. These poems show a young man exploring the
world before him with intelligence, grace, even a
certain bravado. They make a very auspicious first
collection."
Adeena Karasick (poet/performer, author of Genrecide,
Talon Books, 1996)
"An intensely lyrical, speculative, contemplative
interrogation of all that is twisted, wounded,
awe-filled and desperate... writing that is dark,
swollen and balanced with great beauty."
Robert Priest (poet/performer, author of Resurrection in
the Cartoon, ECW Press, 1997)
"Complex, mysterious triggering poems often full of dark
currents and understated hostilities that ruffle the
feathers and unsettle - as good poetry should."
National Post Reviews Budavox
Diana Fitzgerald Bryden:
from Weekend POST BOOKS December 18, 1999
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