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Reviews & Translations


Q Have you ever gotten a bad review?

Yes,  I've gotten a number of mixed reviews and one or two that were mainly negative. Thankfully, they form a small percentage of the hundreds my work has received.The bad ones make you want to curl up and die and the goods ones make you want to dance. If you really are a writer, a bad review will be a spur to greater achievement. Here is a sampling of some online and offline reviews.

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In CM Magazine, Sally Davis reviews my 1984 collection for children Time Is Flies (Toronto: Three Trees Press).  This book is my bestseller with several printings and topnotch reviews by many literary magazines, major newspapers and national radio and TV. In a recent Canadian Children's Literature, Bert Almon comments in general about my six poertry books for children (scroll to the last paragraph). AHAPoetry.Com Book Reviews is run by publishers and poets, Jane Reichhold and Werner Reichhold, and includes two books: Tanka Splendor 1997 (Gualala, CA: AHA Books) & My Shadow Doing Something (Enfield, CT: Tiny Poems Press, 1997).  In Canadian Literature, R.W. Stedingh reviews Five-oclock  Shadows (Toronto: Letters Bookshop, 1996), a collaboration with four other poets.  Other reviews of earlier books can be found at this site as well.   My collection, Almost Unseen (Decatur, IL: Brooks Books, 2000), has gotten excellent reviews-- for four  of them go to Amazon and for one by Greg Yavorsky go to  Canadian Literature. http://www.amazon.com/Almost-Unseen-Selected-Haiku-George/dp/0913719994

    
                                                                                                  Offline                                                                                                                        "An imagist in the true sense, scrupulous about his line endings and careful about the resonance between images." (Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Books in Canada, Jan79, 21).

"A Canadian poet whose particular strength is in exploring the mind-often with humour." (Cor van den Heuvel, The New York Times Book Review, 29Mar87, 28)

"Each of Swede's poems seems to be a small room in a funhouse: compressed, with tipping floors and distorting mirrors, zany and mysterious and curiously expansive for all its diminutiveness of scale." (Tim Wynne-Jones, The Glob & Mail, 7Feb87, E19).

"His images are memorable and his wit is sharp." (Bert Almon, Canadian Children's Literature, 1990, No. 59).

 "A good haiku goes on working. This one by George Swede is an arresting image, but it is also open-ended. Is it sinister or filled with light-hearted anticipation? 'passport check/ my shadow waits/ across the border ' " (David Cobb, The [London] Times Weekend, 19Aug00).

"His lyrics are fine, delicate, dextrous, distilled breaths of being" (George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Herald, 28Jan01).




Q Into how many languages has your work been translated? As far as I know, my poetry and prose have been translated into at least 20 other languages: Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.