Description
Book SynopsisNew and selected poems by renowned poet Lloyd Schwartz.
Trade Review"As in all his collections, the poems in Schwartz's Who's on First? are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, Schwartz's pitch perfect ear for dialogue, his great sense of humor, and a kind of prose like expansiveness that is never slack or merely prose. His long lines, often coinciding with the sentence generate a sly rhythm that depends on an underlying meter that the rhythm disguises even while soliciting. These poems are funny and deeply disquieting, intimate yet decorous, and by that I mean they strike an ever-changing just right unanticipated balance between disclosure and withholding, statement and image, descriptive detail and discursiveness. Schwartz is great company, humane, considerate, and incredibly moving."--Alan Shapiro, author of Against Translation
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments * from These People (1981) Who’s on First? Hannah Mug Shots A Philosophical Problem The Wanderer 78’s The Recital Self-Portrait * from Goodnight, Gracie (1992) Leaves Gisela Brüning In the Mist House Hunting from “Crossing the Rockies”: At the Window Fourteen People Goodnight, Gracie Love Pseudodoxia Epidemica Simple Questions * from Cairo Traffic (2000) A True Poem Friendly Song (by Carlos Drummond de Andrade) She Forgets The Two Horses (A Memory) He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On The Two Churches (A Dream) Pornography Proverbs from Purgatory The Dream During My Mother’s Recuperation No Orpheus Her Waltz Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) Song Renato’s Dream from “Cairo Traffic”: 9. Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art * from Little Kisses (2017) Little Kisses My Other Grandmother Lost Causes The Conductor Goldring Crossword Six Words Is Light Enough? 00 New Name La Valse Tehran Spring (by Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna) Small Airport in Brazil In Flight To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death Jerry Garcia in a Somerville Parking Lot * New Poems (2001–2021) Vermeer’s Pearl Escher: Still Life with Mirror (1934) The World God Hour (Eric Lundquist: In Memoriam) Harvest In Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom My Doctor’s Death Lubitsch’s Angel Ralph Hamilton’s Faces Titian’s Marsyas The Rehearsal Astronomer Notes
