“One of the best American poets… While Schwartz is a serious poet, a poet of love and death, a poet unafraid of bleakness, he is also a joyous poet, and at times, a very funny one.”
Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti
Play Mozart at the Frick Collection
(April 4, 1948) and other poems
by Lloyd Schwartz
Lloyd Schwartz’s luminous new collection Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948) reaffirms his place as one of our most keenly attentive poetic voices. With characteristic wit, intimacy, and musical acumen, these poems move fluidly between the rooms of memory and the rooms we live in, between wry horror, elegy, and celebration. The title poem “has so many planes,” writes Helen Vendler. “It’s one of the most dramatic lyrics I think that it’s possible to write.” One of our most celebrated musical critics tunes his verse to what Nicholas Everett tags the “idioms and nuances of American speech.” It's like being invited into the cluttered study of a good and brilliant friend, where even the most mundane observation is shot through with a bemused heart buoyed by the nimblest of intellects. Each line twinkles at “That dark, knowing little joke,” that we are all of us connected deeply and across time by the art we love and create, and that attention itself is the highest form of devotion.
Available May 4, 2026
Lloyd Schwartz
Lloyd Schwartz is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts, and the longtime classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. His seven books of poetry include He Tells His Mother What He’s Working On (Grolier Poetry Press), “Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems, Little Kisses, and Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press). For his poetry, he has been awarded the 2025 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize, the 2026 New England Poetry Club’s Sam Cornish Award, and fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets. A widely-published Elizabeth Bishop scholar, he has edited three Bishop volumes, including the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. For his writing on music, he has earned three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
“A major poet with a gentle comic soul.”
—Roger Rosenblatt, Kenyon Review
“The master of the poetic one-liner.”
—David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
“How powerfully verse can still deliver the idioms and nuances of American speech.”
—Nicholas Everett, The Times Literary Supplement
