A renowned scholar of modernism and legendary English Professor at Cornell University since 1968, Daniel R. Schwarz turns the mirror and lamp of language upon his own experience in The Garden of My Saying. Schwarz’s own poetry reflects his impressive experience as a world traveler, public intellectual, student of art and music, chronicler of world history, as well as a sensitive respondent to family matters, including remarriage and the death of his mother. These carefully-made poems reflect the sensibility of a mature person who demonstrates how he has embraced life to the fullest while acknowledging that, as in Stevens, “Death is the Mother of Beauty” because the preciousness of life is in part contingent upon its finitude.

—Daniel Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University