A Perhaps Line: Poetry of the Material and Immaterial Worlds

While it is impossible to know how or when a unified view of the self and the universe became divided in our Western view of things, Gary D. Swaim's poems contend that our world is not dualistic. Should we look to Saint Paul or Saint Augustine as responsible for the world's heart rift--even occasional heart drift? More likely, the "fault" lies in our habit of seeing things as either physical or spiritual, material or immaterial, for the comfort of categorizing our ideas and experiences into pockets of thought in hopes of exercising a degree of imagined control over the complexities of life. Although this collection is divided into halves, the line separating these sections is porous, or at least permeable . . . Indeed, A Perhaps Line questions whether that line exists at all, with single words, stanzas, images, and even entire poems moving back and forth between the material and the spiritual. Swaim's poems are rough around their edges from passing back and forth through "a perhaps line," uncertain of their places, arbitrarily placed here or there--all partaking of the material and the spiritual in a collection that merges our divided understanding of ourselves and the universe.

Gary D. Swaim is a faculty member in the Master of Liberal Studies Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. A Minnie-Stevens Piper Professor of Texas, he has authored chapbooks Rider of Asses and Lighted Matches and is a featured poet in 8 Voices: Contemporary Poetry of the Southwest. He has also written and produced a play based on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.