REVIEWS
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Praise for Whittling Lessons:
Poet J. Allyn Rosser writes: "The landscape of Eric Schwerer's poems is both tantalizingly illusive and palpably grounded in real oak and mud and scoops of feed. We are presented with shadowy events and stark figures that, while richly and grittily detailed in zoom-lens intimacy, are also distanced by a spiritually charged pang of inaccessibility. . . .Schwerer's haunting visions make me feel as Frost did after glimpsing the grass though a broken-off sheet of ice: I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight. These are poems that offer a fresh angle on everything, often skewed, always intriguing." |
Praise for The Saint of Withdrawal:
Poet Thomas Lux writes: "Eric Schwerer is a young poet with a great ear (oh so rare!), an intense 'thought-felt' intelligence, and the ability to make his poems' mysteries lucid (oh rarer still!). The Saint of Withdrawal is a stunning debut." Poet Mark Halliday writes: "Eric Schwerer's poetry is fueled by a sense that something invaluable and numinous waits to be discovered somewhere in the misted swampy layers of memory, back there in the smoldering depths of boyhood and adolescence; at the same time, there's a sense that discovery and revelation might prove awfully expensive for the psyche. The poems enact a dance between search and evasion, wanting to catch a quintessence that seems to try to avoid being trapped in language." Poet Molly Peacock writes: "The adventure of reading a poem by Eric Schwerer is like descending through a series of caves, where hints deepen into suggestions, and suggestions slide into moods, and moods merge with intuitions, all leading to an interconnected underground of understanding. In The Saint of Withdrawal, Schwerer explores the interiors of boyhood: its voices, vices and bewilderments. He even devises a special language through which this boyhood speaks. Daring to follow the allure of the shadows of experience, the poems in The Saint of Withdrawal shine with passionate complexity." |