The sheer range of subjects in Lloyd Schwartz’ poetry collection, WHO’S ON FIRST? Is breathtaking.
From a disjointed conversation with his mother in “Little Kisses,” where the poet keeps insisting, “You’re my mother” which she heartbreakingly forgets, to another one with his dying father in “Simple Questions” where the poet asks, “Do you know me?” and “who am I?” to which the father replies, “my son” and where the reader is left wondering whether the poet’s father knew him at all, these poems bring us as close as possible to the intimacies and difficulties one can encounter with aging parents.
His poems about the concert hall, the opera house, and the rehearsal space all get you to live inside the music in the same way that this Pulitzer-prize winning music critic did in all of his reviews. But my favorite line is one that, as a professional musician being reviewed and as a music reviewer myself, made me laugh out loud in his poem, “The
Recital”—“Intermission was a relief.” In his poem, “The Rehearsal” which ends with the line, “We began the second movement,” the reader has been so immersed in the music that it continues on in the reader’s imagination, like an unfinished painting.
Schwartz dwells inside Emily Dickinson’s poetic imagination while inside her bedroom in his poem, “Inside Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom.” As an editor of her poetry and prose, Schwartz knows her writing so well that he brilliantly uses every word of the first stanza of her poem “A chilly Peace infests the Grass” to compose this one about her bedroom. “Rather, it’s immaterial lingering infests/ both the air inside and what we are of the grass/outside—brittle, brown, as if it wanted to avoid the sun.”
There are ekphrastic poems that dwell with the painter himself, as in “Ralph Hamilton’s Faces” when the poet writes, “Tracing the contours of that face, he’d turn the projection into a kind of topo-/graphical map,” some that dwell inside the painting itself, as in “Titian’s Marsyas” where he writes, “Upside down, his tormented expression reads like a smile,” and “The Astromer,” which moves almost as a kind of triptych from the viewers, “Her favorite detail is barely inches from mine” to the painting itself, “He touches the globe with the tips of his thumb and middle finger of his right/hand” then back to the painter,
“Right next to the Astronomer’s right hand, the hand beginning to turn the/ celestial globe, the artist has placed his signature.”
These poems can make the reader laugh and cry and enter realms unimagined, both inside and outside the reader’s comfort zone. You’ll be glad you spent time reading WHO’S IN FIRST, and quite possibly, close the book wanting more.
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