Wayne's College of Beauty

By David Swanger

Book Overview

Poetry. "These poems are both hard edged and beautiful--an exciting collection"--Colleen J. McElroy. "Swanger's voice is credible and compelling, and poem after poem lifts off on its own good... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188615757X
• ISBN13: 9781886157576
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kans
• Length: 85 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Art and Experience

I've long been a fan of David Swanger's work. I love how the straightforward simplicity of his poems' language and structures releases nuanced emotion. His maturity, as a poet and as a person, results in poems that shimmer with the mysteries of "the big questions," while cloaked in the most ordinary and intimate of interactions. While thinking about this review, it occurred to me that "Wayne's College of Beauty" can be viewed, in part, as a modern man's journey through the "Seven Stages of Life." Some of the poems reach back to when his children were young, such as "My Daughter's Morning," "her sparkle is as the edge of new/ice on leafed pools, while I/am soggy, tepid; old toast." (This poem, as well as "Patriarch of the Lake," has been featured by Garrison Keillor on "Writer's Almanac.") In "Longer," a teenage daughter struggles with her questions about death as she talks with her father in the middle of the night. "The girl/glistens, a rosy dolphin riding/swells of seamless youth and health,/yet she worries.../If sleep has an opposite, it is/not waking, but the imagination." At the other end of the scale are poems that capture, with equal honesty and perception, the confusion, loss, and tender sweetness of a parent aging. I think of my own mother as I read "The Lessons": "Fathers diminish like fallen snow." And then there is the voice of "something else" (knowledge? experience? imagination?) present in the very last poem of the book, "What the Wing Says," perhaps Swanger's greatest, and most mysterious. How simply it appears to speak: "Dismiss the grocer of your soul./Nothing important can be weighed." But how far it wants to take us -- I almost said "unimaginably" far, but that's the opposite of what the poem is asking. "Does the future move in only one direction?/Think how roots find their way, how hair spreads/on the pillow, how watercolors give birth to light./Think how dangerous I am, because of what I offer you." David Swanger may be formally retired from teaching, but his lessons keep coming every time we open his books.

Brilliant and Breathtaking

Here is a poet who has not received the acclaim he so deserves. Yes he has some respectable awards... he is, afterall, a professor Emeritus at UCSC ...and a Harvard grad; but why hasnt the poetic community realized his genius and bestowed more honors upon this man; especially when reading this book... I suppose its true that many great poets arent discovered until they die... but if you want to catch him in life... I suggest you read this NOW. Swanger's poems are a gift to us; embrace that gift.