Winter Tennis

This book is about, among other things, reaching that age, usually thirty to forty, when you suddenly see right through yourself. With Swift, this moment of unobstructed vision is accompanied by a fresh view of others. He casts away youthful 'cool' and tenderly mourns his father. He recalls his courtship of his wife wherein he acted anything like the overwhelmingly irresistible Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire. Painfully and wonderfully, he identifies with the nondescript suburban commuter he once insolently heckled in his head. This emergence of deep empathy with others through a clearer view of himself also allows for wonderful poems about the desanctified Japanese Emperor Hirohito or a pretty woman seeing her soldier-boy off on a departing train. These are poems of yearning, elegy, realization, romance, and enchantment.