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Of Angels: Poems & Translations by Wally Swist

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This title will be released on Sept. 11, 2026

 

Angels used to appear in literary works with at least moderate frequency. However, in our modern, often immoderately jaded society, angels aren’t considered at all. Perhaps this is due to the ostensible allegiance angels have to the divine, and divinity is not anything either understood or even thought of in what is a trivialized culture – both popular and literary.

In this collection of thirty-three poems written over the expanse of more than two decades, Of Angels: Poems & Translations, there are angels of varying characters: a poem dedicated to Norwegian poet Rolf Jacosen sets the tone for the book in paying homage to a “Guardian Angel;” Nobel Prize winning poet Juan Ramon Jimenez is feted in another poem, “El Angel Obscuro Se Habla/The Dark Angel Speaks,” and honors his quest for the mystical; a new translation of a little-known poem by Federico Garia Lorca explores the sorrow not only of angels but that precipitated by the human condition; and in “Angels,” an original poem by the author, readers are tantalized by the occurrence of a visitation, in which it is not so much “How they appear” but it “is as astonishing as how they disappear.”

In a sublime presentation, and a balance of original work and translations carefully considered by the author, Of Angels is evidence that these heavenly creatures, who are not born and do not die, exist. However, different from UFOs, angels are of both the real stuff and divine nature. Leonard Cohen wrote: “When we don’t pray to the angels/ the angels don’t pray for us.” Perhaps just reading these poems at least resemble acts of prayer. Certainly they are ritualized devotions that exhort the divine in real ways in which the everyday offers an opportunity to find the numinous in the commonplace, and before we realize that we might chance to see one, “they disappear, and in our astonishment,/ in as much as when they appear,/ they vanish, and instill within us their/ magnitude.”

Author of more than forty collections of poetry and prose, Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press).

Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Anomaly, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, Image Journal, Montreal Review, North American Review, Pensive, Poetry London, Rattle, and Your Impossible Voice.

Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yuseff Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition.  He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me.

Readings of Swist’s poems are archived on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and NPR.

Books of nonfiction include Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (Brooklyn, NY:  The Operating System, 2018) and On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (New York & Lisbon: Adelaide Books, 2018).

Wild Rose Bush: The Life of Mary and Other Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke was selected as an honorable mention in the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation sponsored by Green Linden Press.

Bainbridge Island Press published his most recent collection of his poetry, Discovering What to Say (2025).

 

This gem of a book is replete with angelic sightings and soundings. Wally Swist’s perceptive and lyrical phrasing allows these poems to shine with vision and insight – at times in puzzlement and surprise, at other times, comfort and contemplation. Personal angelic encounters mix with angels of particular place and period; additionally Swist’s poetic voice generously hosts translated work by poets such as Hesse, Lorca, and especially Rilke. Throughout, angels serve as touchstones for our human experiences: ‘angels are the enablers’ of spiritual and creative flourishing (‘of angels’), and as readers, we come to understand how an angel’s ‘light within/ also rises inside you’ (‘Baccarat Angel’).

–Sarah Law, Editor of The Amethyst Review (U.K.), and the author of the historical novel Sketches from Heaven, a 2023 Illuminations Silver Medal Award winner.

 

The image that leaps out to me on reading Wally Swist’s Of Angels: Poems & Translations is that of an angel “gliding into a seam of the air.” These poems and translations render angelic manifestation as something that close—not merely a sacred symbol, but a living point of communion and revelation. Through a range of voices, languages, and registers, we listen for those moments of transmission and transfixion that become for author and reader alike “touchstones to our better, or best, selves.”

–Michael Centore, Editor, Today’s American Catholic

 

 

 

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