Rue Du Regard - Hardcover

Reseña del editor

Todd Swift is one of Canadas leading younger expatriate writers. Elegant, moving, and masterful, Rue du Regard forms the final part of a trilogy, following the acclaimed Budavox and Caf Alibi. Written in Paris and London between 2001 and 2004, Rue du Regard crosses the channel between these two great cities and between two kinds of poetry: experimental and mainstream. The book deals with looking: in, out, back, and ahead. In almost whiplash motion, certain moods, themes, and images from Swifts earlier collections here snap forward, double-back. The universal accidents of travel and memory, love and desire, violence and innocence, are central.

Critical Comment

In this collection, Todd Swift always engagingly readable extends his ambitious and dazzling range of skills and styles.

Roddy Lumsden, author of Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems

Todd Swift has a remarkably capacious imagination.

Montreal Review of Books, 2004

Swift perfects the irreverence of his humour.

Hour

We are lucky to have him overseas contributing to this impressive catalogue of written work.... Finally and most tellingly, Swift asks in A Good Person in Snow: Is it wrong to hold ever tighter as you disappear? The answer is no. Swift writes as if he is about to emerge from the blizzard and tell everyone how he did it. A shape shifter with a heart for Canada. Swift is one to recall, savour, and watch.

The Globe and Mail, March 2005

One of Swifts endearing qualities is that he pays as much attention to the small people in his life, as he does to his mentors and great artists.... Swifts best poems are restrained, tight-lipped and tempered, yet full of sombre and subtle allusion.

Books in Canada, Feb. 2005

Infused with pop culture, Western Europe ... the poems move with their energetic author. Blog-worthy...

This Magazine, Jan-Feb 2005

Musicality hardly begins to describe this rather colossal collection....

Vallum , Fall-Winter 2005

[Rue du Regard] is a carefully wrought package... There is some clever wordsmithing going on in these pages... linguistic panache.... Swift is talented.

Montreal Gazette, Jan. 2005

Todd Swift might be thought of as a cosmopolitan, ... savvy, well read, travelled poet ... a promising poet whose work is entertaining, ingenious, humorous and likeable....

Poetry London, No. 50, Spring 2005

[Swifts] poems cry out for a much wider audience. And if the next big Bloodaxe anthology doesnt contain at least a couple of them, it will be a poorer book for their absence.In Rue du Regard, his third full collection, Swift's work continues to mature. ... In To My Wife Of Ninety Days Swift shows that he is one of those rare poets who can almost always write unsentimentally about love. Swift is still a million miles from becoming one of those worthy-but-dull middle-aged male poets of which the poetry world sometimes seems to be full. The hilarious satire, Note To The Editor, is a poem Im jealous I didnt write myself. ... The beautifully achieved Cinma Du Look is the sort of voyeuristic poem, which, in hands of a lesser poet than Swift, could easily have turned out vulgar. Where others would be po-faced and over-earnest, Swifts poems are disciplined by irony; where most would lapse into crudity he somehow manages to be lyrical. These are hugely important talents for a contemporary poet. But perhaps as important is the stark emotional honesty displayed in Ballad Of The Solitary Diner, a description of the occasional loneliness of a life lived on the cusp of so many cultures.

Kevin Higgins, The Dublin Quarterly, #3, 2005

Biografía del autor

Todd Swift was born in 1966 in Montreal, Canada but is now also British. He is the Director of Eyewear Publishing. Holding a PhD from the UEA, he has had nine full poetry collections of his work published in America, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland. His tenth, out in his 50th year, is Madness and Love in Maida Vale. His poems have appeared for over 30 years in many international publications, including Blackbox Manifold, The Globe and Mail, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Matrix, and Best British Poetry 2014.