Todd Swift was born in Montreal, Canada in 1966. He now lives in London, with his wife, where he works as a reviewer, university lecturer and Core Tutor for The Poetry School. He has been poetry editor of the award-winning online magazine www.nthposition.com since 2002, and Oxfam GB Poet In Residence since 2004. Having received a Creative Writing MA from the University of East Anglia, he has worked as a TV writer and is the author of three poetry collections. Being himself editor of several poetry anthologies, his own poems have been anthologized, have appeared in international poetry magazines and have been broadcast around the world. He is a winner of a Young Quebecer of the Year Award, and has been short-listed for The Irving Layton Poetry Prize. He has twice been the Quebec representative for The League of Canadian Poets.

Quelle: poetry p f

My Violin Player

stocks her cupboard well, unfolds
her chrome music stand nightly;
orders airline tickets in multiples,

for the same destination, only to
cancel them casually three weeks
later. She invites order home,

and plays with it. Studies things
for some quiet sake. Hoards
passion, then lets it go to waste.

Marries haste to duller patience,
elegance to mad dancehall songs.
Is never wrong, until the last act.

Turns law to theatre, drama to
discipline with a long violin bow.
Cures nerves with ice and feathers.

My violinist is more than talk.
Her real vocation's not avocat.
Two blocks from Baker Street

she solves the petite mysteries
of marriage in garters from Paris, her
instrument held in two purple gloves.

in collection Rue Du Regard, 2004,
DC Books, MontrealISBN 0-919688-11-X (pbk)