SOURCE: Muratori, Fred. “Selected Shorter Poems.” Library Journal 124, no. 13 (August 1999): 98.

The following essay is a brief review of Schwerner's “Selected Shorter Poems.”

Schwerner (1927-1999) was a maximalist, a poet of expansive aims and encyclopedic learning whose interest in anthropology and religion fueled a poetry that explored the very nature of civilization. The simultaneous publication of his lifelong project, The Tablets, and a generous selection of shorter poems [Selected Shorter Poems], most out of print, is likely to fix his position among major postwar experimenters such as Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Olson, with whom he has been compared. The Tablets is the fictional restoration and analysis of an ancient Sumerian text, complete with scholarly notes, pictographs, debatable translations, and missing or lost passages. More than that, it's a huge vessel into which the poet deposits aspects of his own identity while probing the process of epistemology itself...