I've received a few requests to post the reviews of Armand's books. There
have been quite a few, all very positive. Here's the one I referred to from
Eric Lorberer in Raintaxi.

Selected Shorter Poems
                 Armand Schwerner
                 Junction Press ($16) 

 by Eric Lorberer 

 Not so much lyrics as discrete pieces of a larger tapestry, these shorter
poems of Armand Schwerner combine the adroit playfulness and  formidable
erudition of the master architect of The Tablets. When placed  beside that
volume and his Cantos from Dante's Inferno, this book
 completes an essential trilogy in the annals of poetry.

 As a reader of The Tablets might expect, several works here--mostly  those
presented in the section "Eskimo and Others"--derive from  ethnographic
sources, though these poems are also somewhat caged by their contexts.
Schwerner's best work  ranges over the page in powerful strides, an
"endless speaking to voice" in which "it is impossible / to not overhear
the endless speaking in all the bodies…" This attention to the infinite
rescues Schwerner from being merely
 contemporary; though the world in which one can read to a friend "in his
Datsun / by the Staten Island Ferry" exists  in these poems, it exists
simultaneously with, or perhaps even within, an intimate understanding of
"the grief / of the  stegosaurus, pointing / like all long grief / to
nothingness." 

 A collagist of the first degree, Schwerner incorporated into his later
poems material from a variety of other sources:  fellow like-minded poets
(e.g. Robert Kelly, Ted Enslin, George Oppen), but also obituaries, mystic
works,  philosophical texts, and, in a humorous piece of invention, "from
second and third order American and Italian  computer generated
Shakespearean monkeys." Schwerner's formal range is revealed here to have
been equally
 expansive; the book contains prose-poems, a "crypto-play," compositions by
field, list, and aleatory technique, the  rending "Bacchae Sonnets," and a
group of truly astounding pantoums whose impeccably handled falling lines
and  rhythms perhaps best illustrate Schwerner's radically intuitive
word-smithy. 

 For those who love language, Schwerner's Selected Shorter Poems will not
disappoint. Sensuous, complex, and  often elegiac, the body of work here
delivers with shamanic force on its promise to be "song and arrow in the
unrivalled moment."




Here's Tony Lopez recently in Shearsman. Note that I've informed him thatn
of course the book is available from SPD, altho naturally I'd prefer you
order from me, and besides, they don't have the hurt copies.


At once cause to celebrate and to mourn, for at last we have a decent
selection of Schwerner¹s work available in good editions, with a CD of him
reading, to boot, but we¹ve lost the poet, who died in February 1999. Until
now I¹ve depended on the Station Hill volume Sounds of the River Naranjana &
The Tablets (1984) and The Tablets I-XXVI (Atlas Books, London 1989), but
these two are more representative, being the complete Tablets (at least as
complete as they will ever be, now) and a much larger selection of the
shorter work. Schwerner went without a major publication in the States for
15 years but this seems to be attributable to his not having written much in
that time other than a couple of Tablets. He is almost unknown on this side
of the Atlantic which is sad, as that Atlas volume seems to have vanished.
(Atlas is/was a publisher that usually devoted its energies to surrealist
work.) The only time I met Armand Schwerner was just after the appearance of
the Naranjana volume, which he signed for me just after I¹d bought it. I
hadn¹t realised he was in the store at the time, but it turned out that we
had friends in common, and he was great company. Both book and man were an
eye-opener as I had only seen fleeting poems in US magazines prior to that.
Usually classified as a peripheral post-Snyder, post-Black Mountain figure
Schwerner was in fact a wonderful one-off, just like his weird and
extraordinary Œepic¹ The Tablets. This large baggy work, unlike any of the
standard modernist long poems, actually has a sense of humour: it purports
to be the translation of recovered cuneiform-type texts from a buried city,
lacunae, variant readings and all. It is a delightful conceit, a mixture of
a wonderful persona poem, a fiction, a jibe at fashionable scholarship and
its pretensions and some great lyrics. That it has not been taken too
seriously may well be because of the delighted balloon-pricking that it
indulges in. If anyone thinks his gentle jibes are off-beam they should
perhaps recall the unfortunate Œtranslator¹ of Minoan Linear B, pre-Ventris,
who managed to make a long poem out of what later turned out to be a
warehouse checklist. The poet is both translator and commentator, is both
inside and outside his own creation. It does not excerpt well, but
individual Tablets can be read with enjoyment. You all need this book,
especially since it includes the CD of the poet reading some of the pieces.
    The Selected is also a necessary book although it might prove difficult
to track down: I don¹t believe that SPD distributes this book so amazon.com
is probably the best source if you are sourcing it from the UK. They got me
my copy inside a month. Schwerner had a lyric heart, like Snyder:
the holiness of the heart¹s puzzling affections / the mountain flows the
river sits /  the obstruction that is knowingness the obstruction that is
passion / ah the universe one brought pearl / suddenly a fire starts, no
fear /    the fear / of death is the fear / of the loss of the present /
like being afraid of slipping / down the sides of the globe not knowing /
the top¹s wherever you are
(Œsounds of the river Naranjana¹)
His is a work that we need these days; he was a teller of tales and a singer
of songs, a man we can follow to strange locations and come back feeling we
understand them better. He¹s gone, alas, but the work lives on.








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