The Garden of My Saying

By Daniel R. Schwarz

A renowned scholar of modernism and legendary English Professor at Cornell University since 1968, Daniel R. Schwarz turns the mirror and lamp of language upon his own experience in The Garden of My Saying. Schwarz's own poetry reflects his impressive experience as a world traveler, public intellectual, student of art and music, chronicler of world history, as well as a sensitive respondent to family matters, including remarriage and the death of his mother. These carefully-made poems reflect the sensibility of a mature person who demonstrates how he has embraced life to the fullest while acknowledging that, as in Stevens, "Death is the Mother of Beauty" because the preciousness of life is in part contingent upon its finitude.

-Daniel Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University

To say that Daniel R. Schwarz is an esteemed professor and man of letters is true, but this isn't enough to communicate that which generates his lifelong devotion to words and literature. This collection of poems represents a portion of that energy, as well as his contagious enthusiasm. Scholar, critic, historian, and teacher, in The Garden of My Saying, Schwarz has collected individual poems that for many years he has been publishing in literary journals. These are intimate, particular celebrations of what makes life worth living, even as their author recognizes life's impermanence. Read them and you'll learn of the heart of this man.

-Peter Fortunato, author, World Headquarters

In Schwarz's poems . . . we find a balance between the narrative and the lyrical in which dialogue participates in an overall - ultimately transcendent - fabric of voices that together constitute the poem. The characters' voices in Schwarz's poems stand out as individual expressions that help to conjure a narrative, even as they are absorbed by some lyric exploration that is carried out by the speaker's voice. Schwarz's voices play out the opposition and, at the same time, the mysterious partnership between the narrative and the lyrical, the concrete and the transcendent. . . . The lyric moments of feeling and perception he describes emerge from narrative contexts of setting, situation, and character.

-Helen Maxson, "Speculations on the Lyrical and the Narrative Modes in Poems by Daniel R. Schwarz," Westview 26:1 (Spring/Summer 2006), 15-20

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1639807659
• ISBN13: 9781639807659
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Kelsay Books
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"