SELECTED SHORTER POEMS

A good introduction to the work of the late American poet whose experiments with form and tone have won him a reputation as one of the last of the old avant-garde. Schwerner (see The Tablets, below) was part of the generation that swam in the modernists” wake and laid stress on personal experience as the guiding principle of aesthetics in general and poetry in particular. His verse is idiosyncratic in a 1950s sort of way, although the subjectivity of much of his work (—I am what I rescue from my nostalgia / my first husband Grigory was Jewish, and my father didn—t like it—) is nicely offset by a strong lyrical voice (—red is the color of spring / it feeds the pattern of her flesh—) that is atypical of a poet of his time and place. There is also a cerebral strain in Schwerner’s work, typified in such longish pieces as “Bacchae Sonnets” and “Prologue in Six Parts,” that keeps him from sinking into the Slough of Despond that swallowed up so many of the experimental others. One gets the impression in the poems here—as opposed to those in The Tablets—of an ego that is conformed to its subject (rather than the other way around) with results fertile enough in their conceits to merit our interest.