Winter Tennis

by Todd Swift

Overview

This book is about, among other things, reaching that age, usually thirty to forty, when you suddenly see right through yourself. With Swift, this moment of unobstructed vision is accompanied by a fresh view of others. He casts away youthful 'cool' and tenderly mourns his father. He recalls his courtship of his wife wherein he acted anything like the overwhelmingly irresistible Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire. Painfully and wonderfully, he identifies with the nondescript suburban commuter he once insolently heckled in his head. This emergence of deep empathy with others through a clearer view of himself also allows for wonderful poems about the desanctified Japanese Emperor Hirohito or a pretty woman seeing her soldier-boy off on a departing train. These are poems of yearning, elegy, realization, romance, and enchantment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781897190296
Publisher:	D C Books
Publication date:	03/15/2007
Edition description:	This book is about, among other things, reaching that age, usually thirty to forty, when you sudd
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Todd Swift was born in Montreal and grew up in St. Lambert. He served on two occasions as The Canadian League of Poets' representative for Quebec. His poetry series Vox Hunt (1995-97) was hailed by The Globe & Mail as "virtually unique in North America." From 1998-2000, he was the Visiting Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, specializing in courses on poetry and film. In 2001, he moved to Paris, then to London, England, where he earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from The University of East Anglia. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Review, The Guardian, and New American Writing, as well as on ABC, BBC, CBC, and RTE radio. He is poetry editor of Nthposition.com and edited the e-book 100 Poets Against the War (2003). He has reviewed for Books in Canada, Poetry London, and The Dubliner, among others, and has been Oxfam Great Britain's Poet In Residence since 2004. His latest publication is a collection of essays entitled Language Acts (Vehicule, 2007), the first major study of Anglo-Quebec poetry in over 40 years, co-edited with Jason Camlot. Swift lives in London, England, with his wife Sara.