Full Description
For more than four decades, readers and critics have found Lloyd Schwartz's poems unlike anyone else's—a rare combination of the heartbreaking and the hilarious. With his ear for the poetry of the vernacular, Schwartz offers us a memorable cast of characters—both real and imagined, foolish and oracular. Readers experience his mother's piercing flashes of memory, the perverse comic wisdom of Gracie Allen, the uninhibited yet loving exhibitionists of antique pornography, and eager travelers crossing America in a club-car or waiting in a Brazilian airport. Schwartz listens to these people without judging—understanding that they are all trying to live their lives, whenever possible, with tenderness, humor, and grace.
Who's on First? brings together a selection of poems from all of Schwartz's previous collections along with eagerly awaited new poems, highlighting his formal inventiveness in tangling and untangling the yarn of comedy and pathos. Underlying all of these poems is the question of what it takes and what it costs to make art.
Contents
Acknowledgments
*
from These People (1981)
Who's on First?
Hannah
Mug Shots
A Philosophical Problem
The Wanderer
78's
The Recital
Self-Portrait
*
from Goodnight, Gracie (1992)
Leaves
Gisela Brüning
In the Mist
House Hunting
from "Crossing the Rockies": At the Window
Fourteen People
Goodnight, Gracie
Love
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
Simple Questions
*
from Cairo Traffic (2000)
A True Poem
Friendly Song (by Carlos Drummond de Andrade)
She Forgets
The Two Horses (A Memory)
He Tells His Mother What He's Working On
The Two Churches (A Dream)
Pornography
Proverbs from Purgatory
The Dream During My Mother's Recuperation
No Orpheus
Her Waltz
Nostalgia (The Lake at Night)
Song
Renato's Dream
from "Cairo Traffic": 9. Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art
*
from Little Kisses (2017)
Little Kisses
My Other Grandmother
Lost Causes
The Conductor
Goldring
Crossword
Six Words
Is Light Enough? 00
New Name
La Valse
Tehran Spring (by Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna)
Small Airport in Brazil
In Flight
To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death
Jerry Garcia in a Somerville Parking Lot
*
New Poems (2001-2021)
Vermeer's Pearl
Escher: Still Life with Mirror (1934)
The World
God Hour (Eric Lundquist: In Memoriam)
Harvest
In Emily Dickinson's Bedroom
My Doctor's Death
Lubitsch's Angel
Ralph Hamilton's Faces
Titian's Marsyas
The Rehearsal
Astronomer
Notes
