Spring In Name Only is Todd Swift's first full collection since his 2014 'American Selected' and marks the first with Black Spring Press. Responding to the age of Brexit and Covid-19, these are lyric modern poems that take their bearings from both Auden and Empson, F.T. Prince and Dylan Thomas - as such, they seek to explore the '40s style' of heightened rhetoric, emotion and personal myth Swift has elsewhere celebrated, as in his edition of the Collected Tiller. Fusing irony and sincerity, confession and oratory, they build a bridge of eloquence, with which to address the key themes of Swift's now-36-year career as a published poet of international stature: fear of death, anxiety in life, faith, despair, love, desire, empathy and critique. No other contemporary poet is as willing to push language to the pitch of perverse stylishness, in the services of poetic majesty. Here springs a restorative fluency that raises the bar.

Todd Swift was born in Montreal on Good Friday, 1966. He grew up in St. Lambert and Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During his college years he was a top-ranked international debater. After graduating, he wrote over sixty hours of TV, mainly with Thor Bishopric, for HBO, Fox, Paramount and Hanna-Barbera, among others. He is one of the founders of the current poetry cabaret scene in Montreal, and was the emcee of Vox Hunt Slam. As a member of the electronic spoken word group Swifty Lazarus, with Tom Walsh, he has released a CD, The Envelope, Please, from Wired On Words, and has appeared on ABC, BBC and CBC radio. From 1998-2001 Swift was Visiting Lecturer at Budapest University (ELTE) in the American Studies Department, and created several courses on film and poetry. His writing has appeared widely, in such periodicals as The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, enRoute, The Dubliner, Gargoyle and Cordite. He is the co-editor of several significant anthologies, including Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. Swift's Budavox: poems 1990-1999 was chosen by Geist as one of the five best Canadian books of 1999. He is a Contributing Editor for Matrix, and Poetry Editor of the online magazine Nthposition.com. He currently lives in London, England.

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