Courtesy of my freight carrier I have a fair number of slightly damaged
copies of Armand Schwerner's _Selected Shorter Poems_, normally at US$16,
at $5. I can accept cash or check in US$ or any EU currency (cash only) at
current exchange rate. For surface mail in the US or Canada please include
US$2.00, US$2.50 in UK or Australia, for air $8.00 to UK or $10.00 to
Australia. The damage is of the order of slight dogears to corners.

_Selected Shorter Poems_ has thus far received extremely positive reviews
in _Library Journal_, _Publishers Weekly_ and _Jacket_. It's to be reviewed
in next month's _Raintaxi_. Here's the press release:

	Before Armand Schwerner succumbed to cancer at 71 on February 4, 1999 he
succeeded in completing this selection of his shorter poems. The resulting
144 pages, first published between 1960 and 1992, are drawn from his four
major collections, all unavailable for at least ten years, and from the
body of his previously uncollected poetry; in all, they comprise two-thirds
of his original poetry other than The Tablets, much of it substantially
revised, plus a handful of translations from French and a generous sampling
of his versions of Native-American, Eskimo and Hawaiian poems and tales.
	Schwerner has been a central figure in the worlds of American poetry and
the international avant-garde for over 40 years, even before his
association with "deep image" and ethnopoetics. Best known for The Tablets,
the book-length serial poem he had been working on since the mid-'60s, he
also produced a large volume of other innovative and important verse which
from the beginning has inspired superlatives. What George Oppen had to say
about Schwerner's second major collection, Seaweed, in 1969, could well be
commentary on the oeuvre as a whole: "A remarkably pure lyricism of word
and silence and of skepticism. ...I think there should be recognized in
these poems the presence of a lyric poet of depth and delicacy and power. I
think, moreover, that these qualities and song itself, whatever one may
read in reviews, are very rare indeed."
	Poems drawn from the delights of fatherhood, the death of friends, the
endless brutality of America's racial sorrows, an uncompromisingly antic
imagination, a knowledgeable  empathy for cultures dependent on utterance
rather than the written word, and an uncompromising and unsentimental
questioning of the nature of human survival, have been joined over time by
poems of profound meditation as Schwerner's commitment to Buddhist practice
deepened. They range in subject matter from poems written with and for his
children to the profound and careful meditations on the small and large
movements of intellect, emotion and spirit in poems like "The Work," "The
Joy of Sven Hedin" and "The Will," and finally to the magisterial "Sounds
of the River Naranjana," the six pantoums, and the seven "Bacchae Sonnets"
that close the collection.
	This work, poet and critic Michael Heller has said, is, "put plainly,
astonishing. Every technical achievement is a figure of its spirit-work and
every deepening of its vision a unique poetic mastery. In American poetry
he seems without precedent or peer, a poet whose work is a luminous
addition to the canon." It "surely stands among the more significant
achievements of late 20th century poetry," he states elsewhere.
	Among his other contemporaries Diane Wakoski has emphasized his music:
"[He]  has a remarkable and complex ear. His poems are ecstatic and lyric.
He follows truly in the tradition of Whitman singing the song of
pantheistic joy for the beloved self living in the beloved world. The voice
is compelling, wondrous, alive with sensuous music."
	Jerome Rothenberg perhaps best sums up the importance of Schwerner's work:

"Armand Schwerner has been one of the master poets of my time—both in his
great ongoing work The Tablets and in the solitary poems and sequences
assembled here. What he leaves us is a lifetime's work—a gift—original and
pointing back to origins—of thoughts fused into structures, compactions,
that stun the imaginations of those who hear him. The ancients called it
"wisdom poetry," & I know of no contemporary who has been more into its
practice. Schwerner writes here from his own body—and by so doing, he takes
us into new and distant worlds."

	Poet, translator from many languages, musician, performance artist and
essayist, Armand Schwerner published sixteen volumes of poetry and
translation. He was involved in both the Deep Image and the Ethnopoetics
movements. His version of Sophocles' Philoctetes was recently published in
the Penn Greek Drama series. His work has appeared in over fifty
anthologies. His long poem sequence, The Tablets, has been adapted for the
stage by the Living Theater and incorporated into the Panasian-American
multimedia work, Dragon Bond Rite.
	Armand Schwerner was born in Antwerp in 1927 and migrated to the United
States with his family in 1936. Bilingual in French and English, he studied
at the Université de Genève as well as at Cornell and Columbia. He was for
many years a professor of English at the College of Staten Island of the
City University of New York. He died on February 4th, 1999.




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