Rue Du Regard [Paperback]

Swift's latest collection Rue du Regard is alternately mischievous and heartfelt, a fine tightrope act between Paris and London. "Be honest," he writes in one poem, "or if not honest, earnest; or if not earnest, then extravagant" - elegant poetry, and civilized advice, from a Canadian abroad.

Todd Swift's Rue du Regard is the third part of a loose trilogy he began with Budavox and continued with Cafe Alibi. In Rue du Regard, the poems are personal, political and poignant. The book is a kind of farewell to Paris, where the poet lived for a couple of years, and a hello to London. Among the subjects covered, Swift's recovery from whiplash is treated without sentimentality but with plenty of emotion in a number of poems that view the body in a new light, identifying the human at the centre of the impersonal medical processes, finding tenderness through pain.

Elsewhere, there are tender and humorous odes to his wife, curious character portraits of the people he meets in his daily life, and a celebration of cinema, that most Parisian of pastimes, in a series of fine poems.

Rue du Regard is the culmination of a trilogy, but it is also full of new beginnings. Swift's voice is mature, very now, tres hip and totally his own. Most of all, Rue du Regard is a very readable, serious yet humorous, work of modern poetry that marks a new and exciting stage in the continuing development of one of the finest younger poets.

Rue du Regard is a book in which poetic curiosity and poetic anxiety coexist - sometimes uncomfortably so; sometimes with great wit and intelligence. Canadian expat Todd Swift sees this collection (inspired by residence in London and Paris) as covering a lot of ground, crossing - as he puts it - `the channel between these two great cities and between two kinds of poetry: experimental and mainstream'. This kind of ambition is characteristic of a poet who is both self-effacing and unashamedly erudite. Swift's vocal range is impressive, if not completely refined. His vocabulary darts from lyrical to colloquial and back again; he has honed the simple and the complex line.

The cover photograph of Rue du Regard captures a glance between two mannequins in a shop window. The layering of reflections on glass reminds me of that image in Louis MacNeice's `Snow': `the great bay window was / Spawning snow and pink roses against it / Soundlessly collateral and incompatible'. The world Swift (the self-confessed voyeur) views through this window is markedly postmodern: constructed in language and peopled by iconic figures from Huysman and Camus to Charles Bronson. So, New York becomes `Hart Crane's Manhattan'; a sun-baked ridge is `isolated, Straw Dogs style'; a Parisian neighbour is observed in `the Cinémathèque / française of her bedroom'. Swift is a man bombarded by cultural reference points - from Wagner to Vogue. Names are elements in a mantra. Names are reassurance in an uncertain landscape, comfort in an alien city.

      There are three names

      Across the street

      From my window [...]

         When we move

      I will miss

      Their undeviating scowls.

      Pruhon.

      Soufflot.

      Fr. Rude.

      ('45 Rue Saint-Placide')

In itself this incanting of names is neither new nor particularly interesting. But what makes Todd Swift's work so exhilarating is the tension between his instinctively referential, intertextual approach and his desire to go beyond, to capture the essence. `On His Wedding' takes the form of an extended metaphor: the bride and groom (Swift and his wife) `collide at an altar, as though it was a super- / Conductor'; the bride is `veiled, molecular', and so on. It is an accomplished poem, and we await the traditional punchline. But the conclusion to the metaphor suggests that the metaphor itself is a redundant device, like the naming of things.

      Side-by-side, apart, like shadow and

      Direct flame crossing to overlap, as a rosy flower

      Sometimes is mistaken for its name.

Elsewhere Swift contrasts `the world you are writing on the soot / [which] will drift' with what he calls the `atom-moment'. This reduction to physics is simultaneously an elevation out of the unreal world Swift has constructed for himself. But for a poet - the ultimate language animal - this is a dangerous policy. In `After The Orient Express', Swift finds himself lost in his old apartment block in Budapest amongst absent or replaced signs: `To read other lives through a blank door requires skills / I am not allowed' [...] `Name plates on / the other three doors of the landing were each new; / I couldn't ring'.

Swift's unease with language and erudition is also handled with humour. In `Ballad Of The Solitary Diner', the refrain `Thank God I have my books' becomes a satirical dig at his own bookishness:

      Thank God I have my books.

      I can tell by the limited smiles

      As I turn, I no longer have my looks.

And in a brilliantly funny performance piece, `On The Back Of The Book', Swift ridicules the convention of literary name-dropping to which - as this collection makes evident - he himself subscribes.

      Nick Hornby shakes hands with Richard Nixon.

      Dick Van Dyke shakes hands with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

      Bono shakes hands with Benjamin Disraeli.

Todd Swift is a poet of the twenty-first century - a traveller, a voyeur, and at home with Rilke and Eminem equally. And if he is compelled to observe us, it is only because he himself fears being observed, fears being read.

         I went to the American Hospital

      In Paris for x-rays. The machine hollowed out

      My secret bone marrow in its modern key of radiation:

      Voyeur; voleur: reversed brother of no skin:

      You read me outside in.

      (`Whiplash in Paris')

I have no hesitation in recommending Rue du Regard very highly indeed.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  4.7 out of 5 stars