Swan Song by Armen Davoudian

Description

“Swan Song is a book of abundance. These are poems of memory and poems of plenty, poems where remembrance is restorative.” —Emily Leithauser, “New with Loss”: Armen Davoudian’s Swan Song (Kenyon Review) 

A swan song is a song of departure: after a lifetime of silence, the legend goes, the mute swan breaks into song just before leaving this world for good. Armen Davoudian’s Swan Song chronicles what it’s like to take leave of a home, a country, a past life. In their search for a home in language, these poems combine the formal resources of English and Persian poetry, turning the immigrant’s permanent sense of loss and rootlessness, the gay person’s sense of alienation, into artistic assets—positions of outsiderhood from which to witness and record.

“What beautiful poems! Armen Davoudian’s superb Swan Song speaks with a lushly sensuous music. It’s full of a longing that is both sweet and harsh, as when he describes the blackness at the center of a red tulip ‘as though / a cigarette had been put out in it.’ The poems’ protagonist is the poignant recorder of the ‘patchouli funk,’ saffron, and rosewater of a coddled Iranian childhood. And his is a princely sensibility—but adaptable, happily unperturbed in a ‘one-bath four-person household.’ Formally virtuosic, sometimes passionately, comically opinionated—‘Everyone in my all-boys school is dumber than me’—Davoudian can also describe the trauma caused by the president and his travel bans with devastating precision and understatement. That he loves men is a mostly undramatic matter, and he observes the antics of straight attempts at coupling with sympathy. This marvelous book casts a spell, the reservoirs of desire filling and emptying in rhythmic cycles, and reading it is a visit with a charmed voice. Long may it sing.” —Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas |Judge of the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition

“Armen Davoudian’s poetry is very rich—rich with histories, cultures, and contexts; sensuously rich in its evocations of colors, tastes, textures and smells; personally rich in its complex reminiscences and vivid apprehensions; and above all linguistically rich in its gorgeously modulated structures and cadences. I’ve rarely come across so much scrumptious poetic splendor in such a small place. This chapbook deserves a very emphatic ‘Bravo!’” —Dick Davis, author of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

Armen Davoudian

Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, Narrative, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University.