Autumn Road

Brian Swann’s Autumn Road consists of three interrelated parts: “ghosts/on paper, anonymous, ambiguous, festive—,” from the viewpoint of someone “similar to/who I am, but not me.” There should be no “mistaking flashes” for “heliography.” This poem, “Heliography” and another in Part I, “The Lost Boy,” is set during and after World War II in Northumberland, England, a world of farm, coal mine, family, and relatives. Later, in adolescence, the scene moves to the fen country of East Anglia and focuses on a difficult father and a violent world. Part II centers on “Ars Amatoria” in its various manifestations: marriage, the family and children. Part III, Eschatology,” looks back but also forward. It moves through middle age to “Three Score and Then Some.” What it sees is “the River Jordan spreading across night sands,” friends and family no longer here. It ends with the title poem, set in New York’s western Catskill Mountains: “I look for ecstatic image/here below where the year is dying fiercely.”