Taking Residence
By Wally Swist
Shanti Arts Publishing
Wally Swist’s 17th full-length collection of poetry, “Taking Residence,” offers a simple but striking cover illustration, mostly in black and white. The silhouettes of two small birds, facing one another and each clutching a twig in its beak, stand atop a nest they’re building — a nest shaped like a heart.
It’s a fitting introduction to one of the key themes of Swist’s new collection: that true love and understanding come from living in the moment and, as a line from the title poem puts it, “learning what it is that is taking residence in the heart.”
Swist, a former longtime Amherst resident now living in South Hadley, has always drawn on a number of sources for his work, in particular the natural world and Eastern religions and philosophies, as well as the world of literature and art. But in “Taking Residence,” he ranges further, covering politics, the passing of a good friend, and childhood memories.
“Taking Residence,” by Shanti Arts Publishing of Brunswick, Maine, also features Swist’s translations of 26 poems by Federico Garcia Lorca and St. John of the Cross (Spanish) and Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italian).
Swist bookends his new collection with poems recounting childhood stories, giving a sense to the book of a life fully lived. In the opening work, “Rock and Meadow,” the narrator relates the story of a friend, who tells him that when she was eight, she “perched / on the rock that she claimed as a throne / in the meadow near her home, // ruling over her peers in the neighborhood with / her scepter, or rather a deadfall stick. // Now, how wonderful is that?”
Years later, the narrator wishes he could “stop imagining” that their lives might have have been realized in some similar way: “for me to be / that rock for her and for her to be that meadow, // in which she rests upon her throne and watches / the wind’s scepter wave over summer grasses.”
In “Modern Bestiary,” an especially engaging section of his new book, Swist writes of encounters with various animals — minks, snakes, moles, birds — and their place in the world, including on his own doorstep. “The Snake” is a warm and humorous recollection of the poet coming upon a modest-sized reptile as he takes his recycling out of the house: “its head poised about five or six / inches off the ground in a right angle // to its body.”
The narrator is pleased with the snake’s seeming ease with him and its “primed electric elegance, its watchful // stillness, the penetrating incisiveness / of the dots of its bulging black eyes.”
“Giraffes,” however, is a meditation on our country’s increasingly bitter political divide and diminshed circumstances, with Swist imagining Americans as the long-necked creatures, separated into two herds by a mountain between them and grazing on the leaves of the lower branches of trees — because those on the upper branches have become dessicated.
“As we browse trunk to trunk, we think of the herd // on the other side of the mountain; we have not been able to love, / nor have we found a pathway, both of us only having evolved // to being giraffes, roving the woodlands without ever satiating / our hunger, by galloping first in one direction, then another.”
Yet Swist always finds more beauty in the world than darkness, whether watching a heron at a pond on a fall day — “this magician, this master angler, // standing in silence / amid the willows, / and wading among the reeds” — or remarking on the simple pleasure of selecting a good red pepper to be part of a sandwich.
“Cannily constructed, it is what the French call a well-made book,” writes one reviewer of the new collection. “[I]t is stunningly rangy, comprising insights into politics, the meditative life, the natural world and far more.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.