Jeffrey Schwartz packs many punches in his short new collection of poetry, Small Talk. With themes ranging from aging parents to Covid to antisemitism, Schwartz does not shy away from ambitious topics, and treats them with tenderness, honesty, and luminosity.
In the first poem in the collection, “I know what it’s like,” the poet writes about a conversation with his ninety-five-year-old father. He uses a familiar, yet surprising image to describe how the talk proceeds after his father has voiced his usual complaints: “Anger/& impatience dissolved like a pair//of chalky tablets in a tall glass/of milky water.”
Towards the end of the poem, after recounting some of the details of their conversation — including his father finally turning down the TV stuck on football — the poet embodies his father in a very simple, natural way: “I felt his heart pounding//in my chest.”
In “The Open Field,” Schwartz imagines Rumi at a poetry reading being held over Zoom — likely due to Covid. An epigraph by Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing/there is a field. I’ll meet you there”) sets the stage for a short discourse on “rightdoing” in the time of Covid: “We haven’t learned yet to calculate distance vs intimacy like the doctors/at Mount Sinai who double their protection with plastic shields.” Covid itself becomes a metaphor for how we need to protect ourselves and still stay connected as caring, compassionate human beings.
In “Believe It,” Schwartz revisits the Tree of Life shooting. He begins by saying that while the eleven Jews were murdered, he was sitting in shul, as they were, studying Torah. At the end of the poem, he uses the metaphor of a 1936 flood in Pittsburgh to say that we should have seen this coming: “don’t forget how in 1936/ flood waters rose 46 feet in downtown Pittsburgh/before a dam was conceived. Who was listening then?”
One of the last poems in the collection is called “God’s Rules.” It’s a nice poem to round out the book, with a message about the importance of accepting the passage of time and who we are: “In God’s house, no one fears death./Our bodies age, but not in the bathroom mirror.”
Small Talk is a book filled with small, unexpected gifts. The title is clearly understated given the challenging topics Schwartz addresses. It shows that our most important, revealing insights are often contained in the simple banter of everyday life.
Stewart Florsheim’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Honorable Mention in the San Francisco Book Festival, honoring the best books published in the Spring of 2011. Stewart’s new collection, Amusing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.
