Opening Hours

Available NOW! | Poetry - Paperback

Opening Hours is the sequel to Todd Swift's 2020 collection Spring In Name Only.

This book was launched as a birthday gift to the author's godson Alex, who is on the autism spectrum and all profits will go to him.

The past year has been a time to think of the deadly baton, gun and contagion, the fragile, the toxic - what ends, what endures - the scientific, the mysterious, the numinous, the luminous, death, love, books, friends, brothers, mothers, others, masks, TV, music, food, sleep, walks, cats, fear, hope, and the environment, and how the seasons are more than background for a play, but sometimes the stage itself.

These poems, at once freewheeling as song lyrics, but rigorously aware of the modern poets who spoke to the fraught decades of the 30s and 40s, take their bearings from both Dylans, and later Hill, while also essaying longer poems that, like Yeats, seek to locate complex truths in the fusion of rhetorical argument with symbolic, even ecstatic, imagination. The vulgar contemporary world of immediate image debates a more interior, stoic world, of contemplation, doubt, and renunciation.

Souls struggle, but somehow, prove their existence in the act of self-questioning. The art of eloquence, polluted by actual fallen language, rebuilds a rickety bridge, outwards, and what matters is the repair, not the uncertain destination. For, this year of closures and openings that barely seem to ever take hold, must celebrate the fragile moment as much as any permanence. 

** Please note, those seeking to purchase this book may find it less expensive to order directly from a bookshop or amazon in their own country, to avoid long distance postage costs.