Poems and haiku about birds and nature

A Bird Who Seems to Know Me (Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Contest)

Literature & Fiction

Swist, Wally

Poetry

Ex Ophidia Press

Waking up the ducks

Adastra Press

For the Dance

Adastra Pr

Winding Paths Worn Through Grass offers a meditative experience but also invites the reader to step off the page and walk a summer meadow or stand beside a running mountain brook in winter. This is graceful, elegant poetry, controlled, engaging, marked by lyric simplicity, filled with wisdom and gentleness of vision. Swist pays homage to his roots in Eastern spirituality by his tribute to the Katha Upanishad in the book's initial poem, and he includes a sequence of free-verse tanka written after attending a performance of the Japanese percussion ensemble Kodo. Often honoring European poets such as Attila Jozsef or Giuseppe Ungaretti, or American poets such as Bert Meyers and Robert Francis, these lyric poems focus on the evocation of precise images rooted in the natural world, through which the reader, stopping to listen here, now, may be transported by something as simple and concrete as the wind snapping a branch of white pine into a realm of spiritual transcendence, "going further, further."

Winding Paths Worn Through Grass

Virtual Artists Collective

The poems in Velocity continue to develop themes Wally Swist explored in a recent Timberline Press limited edition, Blessing and Homage. These poems offer a distinct sense of gratitude and tribute: the spiritual connectedness experienced in constructing stone sculptures or in stacking a cord of wood; and the simplicity found in the shine of a Shaker wide-plank oak floor or the experience of loss in a favorite dog's death. There are several poems addressed to other poets, such as New England poet Leo Connellan and Canadian lyric poet anne mckay. Other poems pay homage to Denise Levertov, Pablo Neruda, Jack Spicer, and Walt Whitman. Other tributes include a haiku sequence dedicated to the late internationally-respected editor Robert Spiess and to the electroacoustic contemporary composer, Elainie Lillios, who has set a number of the author's poems to music. Often presented through the matrix of natural images and the ethos of an active spirituality, the poetry in this collection addresses the velocity of life experience and the practice of living in the present moment, either in witnessing one's own true nature pool within oneself, as in the rush of a brook; or what is a kind of iconic transcendence found in Butoh, an innovative form of Japanese dance, where we all may "begin again."

Velocity

Poetry. "Wally Swist's poems are lean and clean to the bone. Meditations on nature, love, sanity and evil are limned with grace and clarity. Finally, though, this book is a celebration, the way one man coming face to face with a fox is a kind of celebration"-James Tate. Wally Swist was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1953. His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The American Book Review, The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, Poetry East, The Small Press Review, and Yankee. He has published several chapbooks of his work and is the recipient of a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. "To read a Wally Swist poem is to see a piece of the world in a special way. A whole book of such poems is a blessing"-Gary Metras.

The New Life

Plinth Books

"It turns out Wally Swist is a skilled essayist and reviewer as well as a celebrated poet and a decidedly eclectic reader. Singing for Nothing (the title alone says something about the condition of poetry) is a refined review of the work of both known and overlooked contemporary poets, as well as essays and reviews of the work of a range of artists, writers, and even scientists. The accounts are so intriguing, even for those unfamiliar with the subterranean world of poetry or obscure literature, after reading this book one would want to head off to the nearest library or bookstore and see what you've missed." - John Hanson Mitchell  "Wally Swist's life has been steeped in poetry and guided by a steadfast belief in the power of literature. As book seller, a book creator, a poet, an essayist, a reviewer, and a generous supporter of other writers, he inhabits a world in which reading is indivisible from writing, and can't be untangled from life itself. So, it seems utterly fitting that Singing for Nothing maps that life by way of his essays and reviews. Through the assiduous shaping of his critical commentary on literature from around world and close to home, Swist has created a distinctive, thought-provoking memoir that is also a celebration of literature itself. " - Jane Brox  Singing for Nothing was written over a period of 40 years. The essays, reviews, and other selected prose collected here constitute the author's poetic ruminations, his political and social thought, and his perennial philosophy over that time--to now. Much of the book was composed only recently in an attempt to push the traditional boundaries of nonfiction and memoir. Each of the eight chapters are introduced with anecdotal material from Swist's literary life, which albeit was impoverished financially, at times, but nearly always rich with his meetings with authors and his luminous reading through the years.  Topics include reviews of the work of significant poets and writers; a chapter regarding haiku, an often misunderstood Japanese poetic form, and its intersection with Zen; a few academic essays regarding pop culture, the science of measurement, and the history of retirement in America; several blogs regarding psycho-spirituality; and a guided morning meditation using the chakras closes this book, which also includes some of this award-winning poet's poetry. The volume's subtitle, 'Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir', is apropos for what this book both embraces and what it explores by pressing the limits of traditional literary boundaries.  Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); and Invocation (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in many publications, including Commonweal, North American Review, Rattle, Sunken Garden Poetry,  1992-2011 (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), and upstreet. A poem of Swist's was recently included on the national radio program The Writer's Almanac.

Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir

Essays & Correspondence

Operating System

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. "

Evanescence: Selected Poems

Shanti Arts LLC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Swist, Wally. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Swist, Wally

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Swist, Wally. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Bird Who Seems to Know Me (Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Contest)

Waking up the ducks

For the Dance

For the Dance

Winding Paths Worn Through Grass

Velocity

The New Life

The New Life

Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir

Evanescence: Selected Poems