“Naked: Poems and Other Revelations” by Bowen Swersey; Stone Poet Publications, Southwest Harbor, Maine, 2010; 56 pages, hand-sewn, leather bound, no price given.
Bowen Swersey’s “Naked” offers about 50 free-wheeling poems cast in all sorts of forms, both open and closed, on all sorts of topics, from blueberry picking to defunct pens and gods, to lovelorn dreaming, to Wonder Woman.
Every poem in the collection is an exclamation of some erupting emotion, realization, thought or fantasy, and there is a sort of bare, no-holds-barred feeling from start to finish. Swersey wrestles with everything and feels compelled to express it as nakedly honestly as possible:
The trouble with Billy Collins
Is not that he is a best-selling Poet
Laureate, making televised appearances …
No. The real trouble is
That my readers liken my work to his.
On the face of it this might reflect a certain arrogance – if there is such a thing as a superstar of American poetry recently, it’s Billy Collins – but the rest of the book should disabuse most readers of that skepticism. Swersey is just expressing one observation among a seemingly limitless welter of observations. As much weight is given to his (perceived) similarities to the former U.S. poet laureate as to fantasies of true love (“I Dreamt About You”), a betrayed friendship (“Bait and Switch”), a travel-worn pen (“Death of the Uniball”), and detailed instructions for a dog funeral (“When You Dig a Hole for a Dog”).
Every sentence is stated baldly and directly in these poems, even though a lot of them are cast formally as, e.g., villanelles, pantoums and sonnets. There are flashes of lucid precision (“I have considered many times/What I might have said to you/Had I gone to see you, pondside,/Just before you lost yourself”) and sometimes, like we say, too much information. The presentation, also, is distinctly down-home: Every poem is centered on the page (which, for me at least, has the disturbing effect of raising a question about who is in charge of the lines, the poet or the computer), and the book itself is leather-bound with three X-stitches on the spine and a leather-strip and button clasp. You have to admire the sort of untrammeled energy that goes into a homemade project like this, from the making of the verse to the making of the book.
Swersey, who lives in Southwest Harbor, has a previous collection, “Bread Crumbs” (2008). “Naked” is available in a limited edition by writing to bowenswersey@gmail.com.