Bacchae Sonnets

by Armand Schwerner

Omaha, Abattoir Editions & The Cummington Press/The Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha, 1974. First Edition and Limited Edition, one of 430 copies. Illustrated by James W. Mall. Cream/beige cloth with decorated rice paper label on cover. Unpaginated. Faint soil, no salient flaws. Fine. A sharp copy; please see scan. Schwermer (d. 1999), a Belgian immigrant in 1935, became a post-war experimenter in poetry - at the "maximalist" end, say some, because of the diverse and thorough self-education present in his work - and showed native humor and philosophical depth in this and his other best-known works, "The Tablets", "Cantos From Dante's Inferno", and "Selected Shorter Poems". Perhaps over-interpreted - the mark of a poet of texture and substance - Schwerner gets into sensory and cerebral appeal both dark and light in this short series of short segments, nicely matched by sketch illustrations in the same tone by Mall. l-fltschc1

342 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words.
Schwerner was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and his family moved to the United States when he was nine years old. He attended Columbia University (B.A. 1950, M.A. 1964) and taught at universities in the New York City area until his retirement in 1998.