Swan Electric : Poems

In searching, musical poems, April Bernard explores a range of emotionally complex subjects and forms in a voice sardonic, playful, and passionate. Her "disheveled sonnets" are experiments of self-interrogation. Her memoir-sequence, "The Song of Yes and No," ruefully eulogizes being young, bohemian, and in love in New York's East Village in the 1980s. Then Bernard moves to darker poems of solitude and silence. The final section, "Eidetica," is a funny and frightening sequence of hallucinations. The poet confronts the specters that haunt her imagination -- a crow, Jimmy Stewart, William Blake, a menacing swan. In this stunning collection, Bernard's everidiosyncratic vision combines sternness, sorrow, and flights of fancy in her struggle to find moral footing as poet and human being. Book jacket.

April Bernard is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Blackbird Bye Bye (which won the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets) and Psalms, and a novel, Pirate Jenny. Her poems and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Vermont, where she teaches at Bennington College