Ours Book

I've always admired Cole Swensen a lot. I've heard her read, and she has that soothing NPR authority to her voice, and it's in the voice of the poems on the page, too. But sometimes reading her books is like going to a conference in a field not your own. You know everything being said is smart and provocative and influential, but it seems to all happen in someone else's realm of reference and meaning. I've found her scholarliness overrides everything else at times, especially in the last couple books. Not enough to stop me from admiring her -- but at times to make me stop reading her. But this book...

...It's all about gardens and mostly a particular designer, Le Notre... and about halfway through the second section (it does need a little time to build), I realized I was in love. She has an abiding wit and cleverness that deepens into beauty and just a haunting about-life, about-everything truth, even as it skims over obscure figures of the 18th century or distant royals or just their manicured gardens. I don't know how it happens, but it's natural as a fruit ripening (and there's your inevitable gardening metaphor). Maybe I got caught up initially because I once tried to write my own series of garden poems, but it quickly moved beyond any kind of kinship to just total absorption. And it's funny. I actually laughed out loud at a number of passages ("the fine ladies walk/at a pace that makes/topiary make sense"). Someone passing by might have thought I was reading the latest Sedaris book, not avante-garde poetry.

There's still a syntactical remove in these poems (Swensen's sentences never seem to land). But where that has sometimes felt distancing in her other books, here it feels merely like part of a kaleidoscopic design built into the poems.

This is my new Book To Worship.