Comments by Writers and Critics

"Here is Robert Sward, now in his sixties, still fresh, ingenuous, and funnier than ever. His life--and what a life--is an open book. You can read all about it here. What's more, you will want to call your friends and read poems to them over the phone. I know, I've done it."
                     —Carolyn Kizer

"Robert Sward's language seems to have been invented only this morning, as fresh as childhood, as wise as the animals in the oldest myth. These poems want it all: to live in all beings, all houses, all landscapes, to let nothing be uncelebrated."
                     —William Dickey

"Sward has heard the best pop/op minds of his generation, marrying those sounds with the sensitive responses to such earlier literary giants as Melville, Whitman, and E.E. Cummings... Four Incarnations is one of the very best poetry books of the year."
                     —Robert Peters

""With this selection from the dozen volumes of verse he has published in the last 25 years, Robert Sward proves himself to be one of this country's finest poets--and surely the one most neglected..."
                     —Earle Birney

"Like other good works of art, these poems have the air of having been made for people rather than for other artists."
                     —Pulitzer Prize winner, William Meredith

"Uncle Dog & Other Poems... a poetry of surprise, of individuality, often of bitter fun."
                     —The New York Times Book Review

"Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee... In the animal poems there is a bravery in the face of our limitations, a warmth for our absurdities."
                     —The Carleton Miscellany

"Honey Bear on Lasqueti Island, B.C.... The book is a celebration... Sward's poems are deceptively simple paeans to his life and love."
                     —Pacific Northwest Review of Books

"Half-A-Life's History... The poems of sexual and family love are among the most satisfying in the collection... The poems have intelligence, taste, inventiveness...."
                     —The Toronto Star

Robert Sward's works copyright © to the author.