Small Talk by Jeffrey Schwartz

Don’t be fooled by the “small” in Small Talk.  Generations talk to each other, past death, with humor and gravity, heartbreak and wisdom. Like Dylan Thomas in “Fern Hill,” Schwartz evokes a childhood animated by awe— “the world beckoned & sang”—and then tempered by time.  When a dead mother returns to live in her grown daughter’s “third- floor guest room,” the speaker says to her brother, “You’ll be shocked / at how normal it is to talk to her. Nothing is off limits.” Family members assume Biblical and mythic aspects:  the poet, as Jacob, wrestles with God; Ulysses returns to Cleveland to tell his son of his travels. In “The Weight,” recalling Aeneas, the speaker carries his father—“whispering / in his ear, rubbing his back, // pacing the room in soothing / rhythms.” Schwartz suffuses the intimate texture of daily life with the political, the social and the spiritual. The poet’s Torah study and Holocaust history merge in “Believe It,” a poem commemorating the Tree of Life Synagogue murders in Pittsburgh. The struggle “to suffer loss and claim hope at the same time” anchors this stunning collection.

–Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

Jeffrey Schwartz‘s Small Talk is a book of elegy and dedication, zooming in and out from long-range to intimate vignettes filled with threat and love, current events receding into history, purposeful, accidental, and natural deaths in the context of conscious and compassionate life: “the sky / never beginning & never ending.”

–J. Kates, poet, translator, and Co-Director of Zephyr Press

In these poems Jeffrey Schwartz asks: What is the meaning of small talk? Is it a kind of diminished talk, a redirection of sociability, an invisible talk? Or is it a matter of resistance to the grandiosity of all talk, its volubility, its attention-seeking, its easy certainties? On the evidence of these luminous & tender poems his territory is one of human scale, of quiet & persistent vigilance. He is ever on the lookout for love, a student of loss & of the chances, made of one word following another, for recovery. Among the “lost signals,” isolation and the “smoke of personal history,” he dares “to find words to name what you see,” as if keeping a last flame out of the wind.

–Jeffrey Katz, poet and Co-Editor of So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation