In Late Light

D. H. Lawrence’s feeling for families and Basil Bunting’s precision meet in these poems 'sharp as chipped chert or fer de lance.' A postwar English childhood and Catskill seasonal inventories frame a wiry, impish, affecting life review, rhythmically akin to the Italian poetry Swann has translated, and marking a personal summit. 'The mountain is a pattern that whirls.'

This various and vital collection in which articulate engagement with the sensual stuff of the natural world coexists with philosophic riffs on the meaning of night scents, stars, fireflies, and even family history is a brave, various, adventurous book that reveals with the tang of clear, immediate speech a poet in the fully earned maturity of his powers.

Brian Swann is a magnificent poet. His new book, In Late Light, is striking for its largeness. He discovers universal truths in a bird’s call, or in a remembered family scene, and he makes us perceive them as well. His style is lyrical, passionate yet restrained, immensely knowledgeable and yet attuned to common speech and always revelatory of the human heart.

[Brian Swann's] work enables us to begin to understand a world which is not merely a reflection of our anxieties and desires, but which is truly different in the signals it sends to us through other people and other entities.