England is Mine, Todd Swift's seventh collection of poems, takes on the foreign coolness, tone and lingo of London in the present, while the poet's Montreal past arrives in waves of defiance, solace a
England is Mine, Todd Swift's seventh collection of poems, takes on the foreign coolness, tone and lingo of London in the present, while the poet's Montreal past arrives in waves of defiance, solace and reverie. In poems that demonstrate Swift's abilities as a poet to out-move The Movement (out bicycle-clip Larkin), on the one hand, and revive the British Revival, on the other, this collection pushes old, droll Mr. Poetic Persona to the brink of discovering an urgent, idealistic youthful self within. Public, intimate, clever, and heartbreakingly sad, the poems in England is Mine reveal a poet at the height of his engagement with the lyric idiom.
Todd Swift is a widely known poet, critic and cultural organizer. He is a lecturer at Kingston University in English Literature and Creative Writing and a tutor for The Poetry School. He has published six full collections of poetry, the first four from DC Books. His most recent collections are Seaway: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2008) and Mainstream Love Hotel (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), and a free-to-download ebook from Argotist, Experimental Sex Hospital. Todd has edited or co-edited many international anthologies, including Poetry Nation, 100 Poets Against The War, and (with Evan Jones) Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010).
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