This waking unafraid
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With an unusual blend of playful language, absurdist humor, and striking parables of contemporary life, David Swanger passes on to us he hard and wonderful lessons of life and death, magic and pain. By exploring the divergent outlooks of men and women, considering the possibility of honesty in love, and sometimes drawing upon his Jewish ancestry, Swanger captures something about what it means to be human. The maturity of his voice permits him to treat the most serious of themes without appearing to take himself too seriously, enabling him to create a quiet grandeur from a simple moment, as in 'Patriarch at the Lake'. Often provocative and occasionally outrageous, these poems inevitably make thematic connections that jolt the reader into viewing the ordinary in a new way.--Page 4 of cover.
Table of Contents
Scar -- Longer -- Something about love -- Middle-class metaphysics -- These hearts we would name our own -- Patriarch at the lake -- Bar Mitzvah boy's lament -- Laundry -- How does music measure time? -- Cow tipping -- Two faces -- White-out -- Sycamores-- The limitations of light -- Two stories -- Hands -- What the wing says -- In this world -- Dispensable -- Hero -- Knob Pines -- Practice : father and son -- Elissa plays the piano -- The aunts -- She marries a violinist -- A miner describes his death -- The past -- Matinee -- Ending it -- The heart's education -- Dinner with Jerry -- Photograph -- This waking unafraid -- Oedipus Irvington -- Birthday -- Oxford -- Sloth -- Lover -- Mistake -- We have faced night and warmed each other -- In the cemetery with Lynn -- Style.