Autumn Road by Brian Swann

Maura Stanton recommends Autumn Road, poems by Brian Swann: "Imagine D. H. Lawrence writing with a sense of humor, and you'll have a faint idea of what Brian Swann's rich, detail-packed, mid-twentieth-century English memoir poems are like. Swann arrives on earth about the same time as the Nazi blitz—an air raid siren announces his birth—and grows up in a postwar England that sometimes seems centuries distant and sometimes seems as recent as yesterday's headlines. Swann's brilliant, witty short lyrics make up about half the book, and they're delightful to read, too. This is a generous collection of his work, a distillation of many years, and one of the most solid collections of poetry I've read in a long time." (Ohio State)