       
Todd Swift's fourth collection, Winter Tennis, is a passionate appraisal of
life by the poet at age forty. By turns elegantly sad and radically witty,
the poems move between the wintry wilds of loss and the sun-splashed courts
of wordplay and of language acts keenly observed. Also examined are the
facts of our quickly eroding identities -- life, love, and death. A series
of powerful poems commemorates the poet's companionable father. Others
vividly investigate erotic love, the odd marine passions of the Japanese
Emperor, and, for its own sake, fine verbal whimsy. Everywhere is the
insouciant slosh and splash of language -- street level, poised, erudite.
Winter Tennis confirms Todd Swift as both an unruly literary rebel and
master formalist, nourished by the full vocal range of poetry in English.
REVIEWS OF WINTER TENNIS
"There are at least two Todd Swifts in Winter
Tennis. The first, the one I like, is spiky and
enigmatic, an anthropologist of contemporary culture,
and a real craftsman. The second slips into grand
gestures and an overwrought high lyricism. Swift is a
proponent of 'fusion poetry' so this diversity of form,
whilst confusing, is hardly surprising. Ambitious
writing that breaks the mould like this is needed more
than ever, and in this new collection there's plenty of
the first Swift to satisfy my tastes." - Tom Chivers,
Poetry London, Summer 2008 issue
"Whether talking about something that happened
yesterday or sixty years ago, Swift employs the same
flat past tense and holds back on the identifying
details. The effect is chilling; this is the clearest
indication I've seen, in any form of literature, of an
artist being eager to place this decade on the same
plane of history as the ones that preceded it. Whether
or not this is politically or culturally expedient is a
completely different question, but either way, what
Swift is doing is unique. And it's unique, ironically,
because it reminds me of Auden, and of Yeats, of whole
centuries resplendent with what's been done before."
-
Jacob Arthur Mooney, Northern Poetry Review
"Swift can be compelling when he writes simply,
relying on his own experiences and ideas. In "The Last
Blizzard," he is able to capture the nostalgia for a
whole way of life in a single image: "We stopped to
watch / a white deer standing / in a white field, not
moving." Recalling a past love, the poet notes that "it
promised good eternal things / not just experiences /
that felt eternal as they passed." These lines are
neither clever nor erudite, but they strike a universal
chord." -
Aparna Sanyal, Montreal Review of Books, Spring 2008
"I found a great deal to admire reading through Todd
Swift's fourth collection. ... Swift's poetic voice(s),
as well as what feels like an infinite fund and
combination of words, shifts and crystallises in a
unique way on each page. ... Swift's style frequently
embraces the Baroque, as he makes use not only of
plentiful internal rhymes and echoes but also of
interesting linguistic syntactical excursions. ... Buy
this book." - Dr. Sarah Law, Orbis #143
"Its range reflects the assured skill of a writer
whose curiosity leads readers into strange and magical
places." - Alex McRae, Tears In The Fence issue 47.
"Swift has great gifts for phrasing, as in the
one-line poem Communal Garden: "May takes hold of
summer's handlebars and wobbles on." He also has a handy
wit, sometimes self-deflating ("You weren't Stella, I
wasn't Stanley" in Brando, and, "I'd rise with your
levels/ for hours" in Tokyo Elevator Girl), sometimes
just for its own sake." - Fraser Sutherland, The
Globe and Mail, February 2, 2008
'"What you might hear elsewhere in the book,
of course, could be the terse elegiac poems about his
late father (to whom Winter Tennis is dedicated),
the virtuoso outings like ‘Taking Tea With Charles
Bernstein’, the echt pop-culture reconstruction
of ‘My Universities’ or the careful ambiguities of the
1940s-flavoured ‘Woman At A Station’ with its soldiers
who, rather like exploding shells, “smoke and whistle”
out of a railway carriage window. Then again, it could
be echoes of WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Thom Gunn (all
of whom are name-checked) or Wallace Stevens, David
Gascoyne and Robert Browning (who aren’t) - not so much
obvious ‘influences’, as submarine currents feeding in
to a gulf stream which negotiates very-much-contemporary
situations but also reaches back into a richly known and
appreciated past. Indeed, in the very opening poem,
‘Tomsk’, we’re back as far as Pythagoras while you could
probably trace strands of ‘Onset’ via Shelley to the
Metaphysicals and even the Benzedrine-mentioning ‘Envoi’
has the air of a rollicking Elizabethan ‘insult’ poem
about it. All of which is not to say that Swift is a
Baudelairean flaneur on the pavements of literary
culture (except perhaps in the slightly odd 30s pastiche
‘The Expedition’ and the not-entirely successful homage
to a rather mythologised Gunn) or that Winter Tennis
is a sort of grab-bag of random styles and themes.
Behind it all is a distinctively restless, ambitious and
cosmopolitan voice, a questioning awareness of a
diverse, unlikely world of poets, parents, circus
performers, photographers and emperors, and a passion
for what Swift calls in ‘Some Clarity’ “language, that
strange badge of honour”. "- Tom Phillips, Various
Artists review, 2008
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