SOURCE: Review of “The Tablets.” Publishers Weekly 246, no. 22 (31 May 1999): 87.

The following essay is a brief review of Schwerner's final version of The Tablets and his Selected Shorter Poems.

A resident of New York City since immigrating to the United States from Belgium in 1935, [Armand] Schwerner passed away this February at age 71. The two books at hand are his summation. Schwerner's mischievous, fabular epic The Tablets, assembled here [Armand Schwerner, National Poetry Foundation, 1999] in full for the first time, is ostensibly a scholarly translation of twenty-seven clay tablets from the ancient Near East. In fact, it is a postmodern meditation on language, translation, the limits of knowledge and origins of consciousness, and the pathos of intellectual life. Indebted to Olson's “Song of Ullikummi” (a poem derived from the Hittite version of a Hurrian myth), Schwerner's fragmented, often humorous reconstruction of an ancient “original” is no more real than the...