Rosicrucian in the Basement: Poetry - Softcover

Sward, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887533531 ISBN 13: 9780887533532

Publisher: Black Moss Press, 2001

Synopsis

"I like the wide sweep of it. There are many mysteries between father and son that people don't talk about.... The father figure comes through consistently, there's a lot of buoyancy, and the son is consistent and fine too."
(Robert Bly, author of Iron John)

Rosicrucian in the Basement is a book of poems about Dr. Irving M. Sward, born about 100 years ago in Poltava, Russia, into an Orthodox Jewish family. A conservative, rather stern, five-eyelet shoe, white-shirt-and-tie, 9-to-5 pogrom-surviving immigrant, Dr. Sward became a successful Chicago podiatrist. After his wife's death he became a devout Rosicrucian, a member of a society venerating the rose and the cross as symbols of Christ's resurrection and redemption and claiming various occult powers. Robert Sward's poems, based on his father's life, capture the tension between a profession where one does something with one's hands - performing surgery on feet, cutting corns, carving arch supports - a trade in a sense, and talking with angels, seeing the two worlds: visible and invisible and how seven-eighths of everything is invisible anyway.

"This is a book of poems about a man who works on people's feet for a living, going into a basement on the Jewish North Side of Chicago, lighting incense and candles, and attempting to transform himself using salt, sulfur, lead, mercury and so on as medieval alchemists had done centuries before."

About this title

About the Author

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and now at UC Santa Cruz Extension. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His 16 books include: Four Incarnations, New and Selected Poems; A Much-Married Man, a novel, and the chapbook Three Dogs and A Parrot. Sward serves as contributing editor to the Internet's Web Del Sol and Blue Moon Review.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Moss Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0887533531
• ISBN 13: 9780887533532
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 75