God is in the Cracks
In this new book, Robert Sward combines the mediums of poetry and drama as a series of dialogues between a father and a son.
The discourse spans a period of 60 years, illuminating the complex development of a father/son relationship within the multifaceted perspective of a young man who is growing up and learning about the world.
Filled with creative and unusual characters, the book is very much of a reflection of the author's life. As he writes in his introduction, "At the heart of God Is In The Cracks is my Talmud-conversant father of Russian-Jewish origin . . . in the late 40s he became a Rosicrucian and practiced his rites secretly in the basement . . . Dad evolved his own blend of kabbalistic, Christian hermetic and prescient New Age mysticism which lent is colours to his medical practice as well as to his view of my eventual career choice and several marriages . . ."
Poetry, 120 pages, 6 X 9, $17
ISBN 0-88753-422-8
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 Heavenly Sex
Heavenly Sex is a book of poems about varieties of love, sacred and profane. It is, at the same time, as noted by Robert Bly, a celebration of one of the more unusual father-son relationships. A self-taught Russian immigrant, drawing on a variety of ancient mystical teachings, the father emerges as the book's central figure. As critic William Minor observed, Sward presents "abstruse or complex concerns in a manner that is refreshingly straightforward, even simple" at the same time he manages to tell a story, "providing a continuous narrative thread, yet remaining totally lyrical at the same time."
Poetry, Palm Poets Series, 96 pages, $17.95
ISBN 0-88753-375-2
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 Rosicrucian in the Basement
I like the wide sweep of it. There are many mysteries between father and son that people don't talk about... There's much leaping, but each line, so to speak, steps firmly on something solid. The father figure comes through consistently, there's a lot of buoyancy, and the son is consistent and fine too.
Robert Bly, author of Iron John
Rosicrucian in the Basement is a book of poems about Dr. Irving M. Sward, born about 100 years ago in Poltava, Russia, into an Orthodox Jewish family.
A conservative, rather stern, five-eyelet shoe, white-shirt-and-tie, 9-to-5 pogrom-surviving immigrant, Dr. Sward became a successful Chicago podiatrist. After his wife's mother's death he became a devout Rosicrucian, a member of a society venerating the rose and the cross as symbols of Christ's resurrection and redemption and claiming various occult powers.
Robert Sward's poems, based on his father's life, capture the tension between a profession where one does something with one's hands--performing surgery on feet, cutting corns, carving arch supports--a trade in a sense, and talking with angels, seeing the two worlds: visible and invisible and how 7/8 of everything is invisible anyway.
The inspiration for the book came when he was browsing through his father's Rosicrucian texts and came across the name William Butler Yeats who contributed to Rosicrucian literature.
Poetry, 112 pages, $18.95
ISBN 0-88753-353-1
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