Rue du Regard

by Todd Swift

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 experimental and mainstream. The book deals with 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 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 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

Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ask the blue for more darkness,
it may oblige.
Then, winter is a sky,
night the way a boy
touches her tongue with a finger,
not finding it cold.
Beginning this is lack's reverse.

- Rue du Regard, pg. 3

* * *

Looking isn't love,
but it also pays attention.

The deliberate openness
with which blinds are left

apart, curtains wide, lights on
at all hours of the day and night.

And I, who must
work for a living, bear witness

to her changes, the shifts in
scenery, the Cinémathèque

française of her bedroom:
black and red lingerie, braless

t-shirt hours; the choosing
of a skirt or dress.

- Cinéma Du Look, pg. 16

* * *

It looks to me as if all the wisdom in the world
is stuck in the eyes of these gentlemen in wax.
I'd like to be locked up in here for a full night.
A winter night would be best, especially in the

Serial Killers exhibit, the great waxen criminals
with ashen faces, those glassy eyes, and bodies
made of what, exactly? And why were they
imprisoned, hung, electrocuted, if they'd persist

here forever, their tongue-tied figures on display?
Their eyes cannot communicate the suffering felt,
but encounter eyes ceaselessly, day by day by day.
I would like to witness them in the darkness

going about their secret wax business, after
the school-kids and the parents have passed in safety
through the crowds, forgetting what brings notoriety
to them in the first place. Do they ever get shut-eye?

- Madame Tussaud's, after Valery Larbaud, pg. 46

* * *

It's in the core and tip,
and on the tongue,
and in the air,
and what the air stirs on,
and in the tangle of her hair;
and the mittens
lined with fur
he handled as a boy
to walk in winter night
and collect the snow.
It is the urgent
and disabled Now,
first shadowed,
second memory-bright.

- What Matters And Where It Is, pg. 59