Imago

Imago gathers poems by Brian Swann that take in art, the natural world, and people alike. The settings range widely, from countryside to town and from city streets to places abroad as well as home. Across the book, Swann traces how a self changes over time, moving from a youth spent in England to the difficulties of growing old in America, and he turns that personal history into verse.

The writing is lively and precise, with a keen eye for detail and an interest in both the outer landscape and the inner life. The mood shifts across the collection, beginning in self-criticism and rising toward joy and a sense of reaching beyond the self. The title poem runs to about half a page, while "Elegiac" unfolds over several sections and gives the book much of its scale. This is the author's fourteenth collection, and it is presented as both an artwork and a personal witness.

The book is meant to be read somewhat like a piece of music, a continuous movement in which nature and art weave together and keep transforming. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann imagines everyone caught in a net whose strands knot together under the night sky, where one star dreams of another. The title poem follows an insect through its metamorphosis, the sequence of patterns that came before it, and its eventual break from its old shell, a moment that shows what had been inside all along. Swann's frankness gives the poems a sense of having existed all along.