Sweet Wolf: Selected & New Poems

“Rare, then, is the contemporary poet who gives privilege to narrative as the engine inside the poem. Rarer still is the poet who masters both the art of deep, complex narrative and moments of mystical musicality where in truths feel just beneath the illusion of sense. It’s for this reason the greatest joy in seeing the best of Robert McDowell’s poetic career distilled between the pages of Sweet Wolf is witnessing the massive swaths of ground McDowell covered between the poles of lyric and narrative. Throughout Sweet Wolf, we see his prowess on the level of the individual poem as well as within the selections from each collection represented.”
   
    --Chad Abushanab, from his Introduction: Someplace Between Story and Song
   
   “This fresh, uncompromising voice will be greeted with cheers by readers who have been turned off by the ornate pretentiousness of so much contemporary poetry. Gifted with a novelistic grasp of exactly what it is like to be a twentieth-century American, Robert McDowell is interested in other people, not just himself.”
   
   —Frederick Morgan, Poet & Editor, The Hudson Review
   
   “I am caught up again and again in McDowell’s strong narrative line. Whether he’s reshaping an old myth or detailing an actual event, this poet is a storyteller at the top of his form.”
    --Maxine Kumin
   
   “On Foot, in Flames is filled with loneliness, with the knowledge that ‘the world dismantles us’, but it’s also prayerful, its music an affirmation that threads through even the narratives of violence and betrayal. This is a religious book in the best sense, fusing matter and spirit,
   ultimately, achingly human.”
   
    --Kim Addonizio
   
   “Robert McDowell’s narrative poems are strangely compelling, adding up to an utterly original sense of the world, one brushed clean of all cant, all obscurity and confusion…Dazzling!”
   --Jay Parini
   
   Robert McDowell is the author of 6 books of poetry, 14 books of fiction, criticism and creative nonfiction and editor and translator of dozens of collections. His poems have appeared in in journals and papers around the world, including Poetry, The Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, The Harvard Review and London Magazine, among others. He is a graduate of Columbia University of School of the Arts ('76).
   
   With Mark Jarman, McDowell co-founded and edited The Reaper magazine and Story Line Press. He served SLP as editor and director for 22 years, selecting and guiding into print more than 250 volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism, memoir, writing guides and verse plays. He created the Rural Readers Project and cofounded the annual international Poets Prize. He has taught at UC Santa Cruz, University of Southern Indiana and the low-residency MFA Program at Bennington College.
   
www.robertmcdowell.net