Snow House: Poems

Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize Series

by Brian Swann

"The poems that make up Brian Swann's rich and constantly rewarding book Snow House are muscular and masterful. He has a marvelous ear and the ability to write poems that move insistently forward to a lovely and offhand resolution. The long and sinuous sentences that make up this collection range over the natural world, memories, and myths -- and, like 'a kind of semiotic stuntman,' Swann merges these subjects with the poems ostensibly describing them, so that you suddenly realize that you are being pulled along by a song 'that mirrors itself with you in the middle / doing much of the mirroring.' And yet in the end the world of the poems retains its fierce independence, the independence of 'the world which could be you but isn't, ever, quite.'" -- John Koethe, from his judge's citation "Brian Swann is our poet of the primal present.... Snow House is a profound poetry that wakens us and helps us identify our sublime and perilous location." -- William HeyenThe scraps, bright, all of them, these small birds, as if torn from the sunnow bloody-mouthed, then a broken line moving closer, brant -- no,blue geese, and in synapses all round swamp-sparrows, as blades of lightpush in till the last one takes over so masks drop from stones andon the headland windowpanes are morning swollen and a wave curveslike gravel along the long bay where no hull moves so it all startsto look a little contrived, as if the boats had gone out to seas on cue, and hidden.Here you find yourself shattered at a thousand points, flashing like crabs, a leg here, a claw there, and eyes everywhere. -- "Manitu Bay"

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Brian Swann was born in Tyneside, England. He received a BA and an MA from Queens’ College, Cambridge, as well as a PhD from Princeton University.

Swann teaches at the Cooper Union and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Leah Angstman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of nature poetry, fairly abstract, turning and fro-ing, coming and going, this way and that, a color, a sense, some random description of something seemingly unrelated, separated by commas and arbitrary line breaks. That's the rhythm of nearly every poem, and it gets tedious. The imagery is generally very vague. I like "Natura Naturans," and that whole following nature section was more coherent and concrete than some of the other sections, and thus more enjoyable, save for its repetition of chipmunks, chipmunks, chipmunks, squirrels. This is fine poetry for vague sensory lines, but nothing jumped out at me on a heartfelt level that would stick with me. It just wasn’t my style.