Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift, Tall-lighthouse, 64pp, £8
Evidence, Mary Oliver, Bloodaxe, 88pp, £8.95

Shortly before he died, I used to visit John Heath-Stubbs in the West London nursing home where he was (to be screamingly accurate) incarcerated. To take his mind off his predicament, I would read to him – usually his own poetry, occasionally mine or somebody else’s. He would comment about it afterwards with interesting sidelights on his own work and acute, often biting, criticism of the rest.

Once when I stopped by, I had Todd Swift’s pamphlet, ‘Natural Curve,’ in my handbag. I thought John might enjoy hearing something new. He did, and very much so. He asked me to read all of the poems and had me repeat Todd’s name several times.

I was delighted with his excitement but just a little surprised. Familiar with Todd’s anthologies, his internet magazine, nthposition, and the poetry events he produced for Oxfam where he held forth wittily as a compere, I had not given serious thought to him as a poet – perhaps because of his talent for repartee and skill as an editor. It took Heath-Stubbs’ completely objective admiration to make me think again, and my later reading of Swift’s 2008 volume, Seaways: New and Selected Poems, to confirm further that here, indeed, was a poetic ‘find’.

In Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift’s latest collection, his personal life, including his travels, his familial relationships and his Canadian origins, provides the substance of much of his poetry, although it veers off into wider-ranging and sometimes profound associations. He reveals his debt to psychoanalysis (an almost routine experience for North Americans) with a quote from Sigmund Freud heralding what’s to come: ‘…that strange being, the creative writer.’ At the core of his poetry, however, is conjugal love. Very rare, this kind of romanticism; very honest and elegant in its portrayal.

The poem ‘The Talking Cure’ combines the two themes: ‘…You dance madly/ on our Persian carpet reminding me of analysis.’ Then, struck with his wife’s ‘cute haircut’, he finishes the poem with:

If you’re going to get off, you might as well

get off with me. Your hair whips off a blonde storm,
it could be Ancient Egypt here in our private salon,
the only mark on our carpet your sacrificial coquetry,
your savage cute gyrating set-to-music body.

The ‘cute’ is ironic. ‘Sacrificial’ is key: his goddess renders herself mortal to make lovemaking possible.

Films, for themselves or the experience of going to the cinema, inspire several poems. In the sonnet, ‘Keeler’, Swift considers the actress, Ruby Keeler, a star in the 1930s:

…Pictures older than any love
speak to the ultra-icon in which you lie,
a looking-thing that has no way to die.

These are typically fine, craftily compressed lines. In the short poem, ‘Lily Bart’, about the heroine of a movie based on Edith Wharton’s novel, House of Mirth, Swift brings contemporary cool to timeless human angst:

…
The ache of every thing
is packed up

in the who cares box
called time.
The huffing-and-puffing

is murder’s engine
pulling us around
the bend
into unreadable dust.

and then deliberately kills it with ‘All ladies are adoring/and all my tiepins rust.’, as if his sense of humour and distrust of pomposity, especially his own, have got the better of him.

The poem ‘Wax-A-Way’, about engaging in that most intimate of conjugal duties, helping with a depilatory, begins:

Like kind kitchen-sink abortionists
we set about our task with concerned jollity.

Swift’s images are acute and memorable. Note the lovely oxymoron, ‘concerned jollity’. And how sweet the thought that there are ‘kind kitchen-sink abortionists’! (So many in the world still have need of them.) Outrageous at times and sometimes very angry at the world’s injustices, his poetry is often sweet, though never saccharine. For example, this first stanza of one of his longer poems, ‘Love Song in a Time of Inflation’:

Only you, and money, and sunlight
hold up any clear possibility,
and joy is not to be undervalued,
is to be portfolio-carried, a fluid
securitisation, to transfer one kind
of happiness across to another form;
words are only digital blips
on a screen in one account
or another; there’s a vault holding
all our hearts, our souls, our meanings;

Todd Swift’s postmodernism artfully bridges the past and the present millennia.

*******

I ought to feel a special kinship with Mary Oliver. We are similar ages and both citizens of the United States. Moreover, as a feminist I am usually given to supporting other women, especially those who are old, like me.

But Mary Oliver has had more than enough support. Twenty-two of her poetry collections have been published, she has won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Poetry Book Society here in the United Kingdom has awarded Evidence a ‘special commendation.’

The blurb on the back of the book claims that Mary Oliver is ‘one of America’s best-loved poets’ and compares her to ‘Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson’. These encomiums demean those estimable poets as well as, by implication, such American contemporaries as Maya Angelou, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the late Sylvia Plath, among many others. Sadly, this collection is, for the most part, hopelessly banal.

Here is Oliver’s poem ‘Philip’s Birthday’ in its entirety:

I gave,
to a friend I care for deeply,
something that I have loved.
It was only a small

extremely shapely bone
that came from the ear
of a whale.
It hurt a little

to give it away.
The next morning
I went out, as usual,
at sunrise,

and there, in the harbour,
was a swan.
I don’t know
what he or she was doing there,

but the beauty of it
was a gift.
Do you see what I mean?
You give, and you are given.

Oliver has a habit of ruining what otherwise might be an acceptable poem with a turgid moral at the end. For instance, ‘Swans,’ which begins simply enough with: ‘They appeared/over the dunes,/they skimmed the trees/and hurried on’, offers in the final stanza: ‘What we love, shapely and pure,/is not to be held/but to be believed in.’ This after, of course, she described their wings as ‘bright as snow’. (Well, that’s ‘bright’ at least, not ‘white’.)

The poem ‘Spring’ begins: ‘Faith/is the instructor./We need no other.’ Oliver then anthropomorphises faith as a young man: ‘Guess what I am,/he says, in his/ incomparably lovely/young man voice./…’

‘Spring’ continues:

Then he who owns
the incomparable voice
suddenly flows upward

and out of the room
and I follow,
obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking
the Lord was once young
and will never in fact be old.

It’s true that I don’t share Mary Oliver’s religious convictions, but isn’t this kind of pap insulting to Jesus?

There are one or two short poems in Evidence where the hint of a real poet sneaks through – in ‘Snowy Egret’, for instance: ‘Don’t think he is a casual part of my life/that white stroke in the dark.’

But that’s as good as it gets.