Swan Electric: Poems

by April Bernard

Overview

"Bernard has written a gorgeous, tough, haunting book."—Frank Bidart

April Bernard's idiosyncratic and profoundly emotional voice combines flights of fancy, moral sternness, and wit in broadly explorative poems—from a memoir sequence about the East Village in the 1980s, to "disheveled" sonnets of self-interrogation, to darkly comic hallucinations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393325089
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/2003
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

April Bernard is the author of five previous poetry collections and two novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, the Stover Memorial Prize in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Whitney Humanities Center, she lives in Upstate New York and teaches at Skidmore College and the Bennington College MFA writing seminars.

Table of Contents

I.
	See It Does Rise	15
	Tatters	16
	Masabeesee	17
	Ktaadn	18
	Sonnet in E	19
	The Wise Word, The Good Word	20
	English as a Second Language	22
	Hogback	23
	Dome	24
	Four Winds	25
	NY Sch	26
	Music through the Ceiling	27
II.
	Song of Yes and No
1.	Was There No Telephone?	31
2.	They Were All Crazy	33
3.	What Would Happen Then	36
4.	Cold and Dignified	37
5.	Dial-an-Edict	38
6.	Fears	40
7.	Cosi fan tutte	41
8.	The Next Little Dollar	42
9.	Fire Power	44
10.	Summer Out of Town	45
11.	Coffee & Dolls	47
12.	Opera Interlude	49
13.	Hell	51
14.	Funny Weather	52
III.
	Failed Marriages of the Movie Stars	57
	Wampeer	58
	That's What I Said	59
	She Runs with Her Skirts Up	61
	Pierced	62
	Procedurals	63
	Sport	64
	Across from Grace	65
	Fort-Da	66
	Go Between	67
	Not Rome	68
	Although Many Things Make Me Nervous and Sad	69
	As Fish	71
IV.
	Eidetica
1.	Large Crow	75
2.	Jimmy Stewart	76
3.	Dancing Bear	77
4.	Dead Brother	79
5.	The Women Who Won't Appear	80
6.	Blake and Snake	82
7.	White Tree	84
	Coda: Swan Electric	85
	Notes	87

What People are Saying About This

W.S. Merwin

A poet of obvious gifts and power and ambition, unsparing and brilliant.

Editorial Reviews

A marvelous poet.

New York Times Book Review

A poet of obvious gifts and power and ambition, unsparing and brilliant.

W. S. Merwin

At the heart of Bernard's latest collection is a series of poems about living in the East Village in the nineteen-eighties. The series, named for a Kurt Weill song, forms a sort of loose-leaf memoir, and includes just the personalities we might expect -- poets, musicians, and art critics, most of them thin and poorly dressed. In "Dial-an-Edict," the speaker and her cohort live like gentry in a dull provincial town; dispatching wisdom via telephone, they "pretended to know the (one or two) things we did not." Bernard misses none of the irony intrinsic to her youthful ideals, yet she also manages to distill the pain of a hopeful, uncertain time. Her characters struggle to remake the world, even if, in the end, it is only "the world of our friends and their friends."

The New Yorker

Throughout this heterogeneous second collection, Bernard's speaker works hard to read significance into personal encounters and recollections, ranging from vague, internal musings to memories of the East Village in the 1980s to imagined encounters with dead writers, celebrities and animals, among others. In the opening poems, Bernard's speakers circumnavigate a generally somber internal landscape, often using the natural world as a point of reference. Sea, sky, sun, wind, light and snow make frequent appearances, and seem to occasion some of the book's most vague and tortuous musings: "How often is too often, what if this heat tore through me constant as the sky I tear apart...." Quite often, the poems' speakers seem frustrated or even bored by their own interiority ("...oh it's just the same old dream of melting"). Similar problems haunt the East Village sequence, in which an evocative, though essentially familiar cast of characters the "squatter," the "lover of a famous poet" play out the routines and pretensions of countercultural life, but rarely offer the reader either a surprising insight or a startlingly good story. In the book's final two sections, Bernard seems to reach for an imaginative or fantastical escape from the biographical and its attendant ennui; the result is that speakers encounter Jimmy Stewart or the dancing bear from Captain Kangaroo. Occasionally though, the freewheeling imagination seems poised to succeed, with flashes of music and humor that could well suggest strategies for future work: "Seek error. Forgive soot. Let the lion find his own way about the house, and provide him a swinging door. Feed the lion." (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly