Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful

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Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful combines poems selected from A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings with recent poems. Set in the South, with references to Tennessee, the Gulf, Memphis, and Mississippi, the result is a book that reads as a book, not as a miscellany, offering section by section poems of nature, family, art, and marriage, and then, with the new poems, the painful dissolution of the marriage, a multi-faceted self-portrait, and finally, the elegiac “Grace” about the death of Lovitt’s mother.

“Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful is a beautifully organized book, the first half made up of selected poems from A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings, 2004, poems of nature, family, art, and marriage, and the second half comprised of recent poems, 2005-2010. The division between the two is almost seamless. Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful is a volume I watched, sometimes impatiently, carefully take shape across the years. It was worth the wait.”—D.C. Berry, author of Saigon Cemetery, Divorce Boxing, Vietnam Ecclesiastes, Hamlet Off Stage, A Week on the Chunky and Chickasawhay

About the Author

SWEP LOVITT was raised in Mississippi and after thirty years abroad, Memphis, TN., has returned to live in Brookhaven. Swep’s publications include a volume, A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings, UKA Press, 2004, and 70 poems in 35 mags/lit journals including Texas Review, Mississippi Review, Poem, and Visions-International. Swep has two grown sons and a daughter, all with poems of their own.

Reviews

“Sometimes The World Is Too Beautiful is a beautifully organized book, the first half made up of selected poems from A Boy’s Face With Swan Wings, 2004, poems of nature, family, art, and marriage, and the second half comprised of recent poems, 2005-2010. The transition between the two parts is seamless, "You Were Good," the marraige spiriling downhill, the final poem of Boy's Fc, giving to the finality of "Divorce Papers" and "Endings," the lead poems of the second half. Then, a miscellaneous section with pieces like "Yes, You," its dream lover (incanted?), its premonition, its tryst (imagined?), and finally her speech: "I wonder, is there/A next room to the dream?"

Next, eight poems, poems such as "Personal Ad," which taken together provide a portrait of the poet that is by turns wry, and always intense. The second half, and the book, conclude with "Grace," a poem about the death of Swep's mother, the closing line:

A friend offers, she wants you
To know everything's okay,
That in death we're young again.
And me, the dead don't look
Back, that is their earned grace.

Sometimes the World Is Too Beautiful is a volume I watched, sometimes impatiently, carefully take shape across the years. It was worth the wait.
—D.C. Berry, author of Saigon Cemetery, Divorce Boxing, Vietnam Ecclesiastes, Hamlet Off Stage, A Week on the Chunky and Chickasawhay

Published by Texas Review Press

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