SPRING IN NAME ONLY Format: Paperback

Poetry. SPRING IN NAME ONLY is Todd Swift's first full collection since his 2014 American Selected and marks the first with Black Spring Press. Responding to the age of Brexit and Covid-19, these are lyric modern poems that take their bearings from both Auden and Empson, F.T. Prince and Dylan Thomas—as such, they seek to explore the '40s style of heightened rhetoric, emotion and personal myth Swift has elsewhere celebrated, as in his edition of the Collected Tiller. Fusing irony and sincerity, confession and oratory, they build a bridge of eloquence, with which to address the key themes of Swift's now-36-year career as a published poet of international stature: fear of death, anxiety in life, faith, despair, love, desire, empathy and critique. No other contemporary poet is as willing to push language to the pitch of perverse stylishness, in the services of poetic majesty. Here springs a restorative fluency that raises the bar.

Todd Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, on Good Friday in 1966. He now lives in London, UK. He most recent work includes OPENING HOURS (Maida Vale Publishing, 2021), SPRING IN NAME ONLY (Eyewear Publishing / Black Springs Press, 2020), THERE'S AN EXCUSE AT THE HEART OF BEING THAT'S WILD (Eyewear Publishing, 2019), and DREAM-BEAUTY-PSYCHO (Eyewear Publishing, 2017).