Quick, Said the Bird: Williams, Eliot, Moore, and the Spoken Word by Richard Swigg is now available from the University of Iowa Press.

When William Carlos Williams said, “It’s all in / the sound,” when T. S. Eliot hailed the invigorating force of the “auditory imagination,” or when Marianne Moore applauded “the clatter and true sound” of Williams’ verse, each poet invoked the dimension that bound them together. In Quick, Said the Bird, Swigg makes the case for acoustics as the basis of the linkages, kinships, and inter-illuminations of a major 20th-century literary relationship.

Steven Gould Axelrod, coeditor of The New Anthology of American Poetry, volume 2, Modernisms, 1900–1950, commented, “One feels better for having read Richard Swigg’s Quick, Said the Bird. Swigg links Eliot to his alleged opposite, Williams, and then links them both to Moore—a valuable endeavor. There is a genial, learned, sensitive, emotionally vital quality to Swigg’s commentary. This is a beautifully written, highly intelligent study that will stay with the reader for some time.”

Swigg, former senior lecturer at Keele University, is the author of Lawrence, Hardy and American Literature, Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition, and Look with the Ears: Charles Tomlinson’s Poetry of Sound. He has collected, edited, and published the collected recordings of William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid.

The book is available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.