In what can be described as a watershed collection of poetry, Evanescence: Selected Poems assembles nearly 250 poems by Wally Swist. Largely nature poems and poems regarding spirituality, this work spans some thirty-five years of writing and publishing. However, there are also poems contained here regarding the joys of cuisine; the power of childhood memories; and to quote Robert Frost, as Swist does in prefacing his own poem, A Wild Beauty, his political poems can be seen as momentary stays against the confusion of the world. What this collection thematically offers is a breadth and heft of work through which we may comprehend anyone’s life, and despite its full measure and cadence, we realize that the present moment is really all we ever can experience, and in experiencing our lives this way we become aware of how truly brief our lives are, yet how stunning and beautifully interconnected they are and how intrinsically and innately precious–as Swist writes in one of his poems regarding the endangered monarch butterfly, A Way of Seeing:
that is a reminder of the morning, a brightness and / fulfillment vanishing; / endangered and soon extinct, as / when we look and see, there in the empty air.