dream-beauty-psycho

Todd Swift’s latest trip to the world of desire and retro style, sometimes Lynchian in scope. Rhetorically wild at heart, these onrushing poems of religion, marriage, sex and phantasy establish Swift as one of the auteurs of contemporary English poetry. His 33-year-oeuvre is now, more than anything, its own cinematic universe of replicated tropes, fetishes, words and allusions. This could be a psychobiography dreamt up by Freud. Over it all looms the year 2016: the deaths of Bowie and Cohen, and Trump’s rise - but the crowning achievement here

may be the poems celebrating recent books by Denise Riley and Derek Mahon, who each create a ‘bridge of eloquence’.