Additional information
Weight | .7875 lbs |
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Dimensions | 6 × .2 × 7.9 in |
A radiant new book-length sequence chronicling the ways observation creates landscape
$17.95
Weight | .7875 lbs |
---|---|
Dimensions | 6 × .2 × 7.9 in |
Influenced by the history of landscape painting, Cole Swensen’s new book is an experiment in seriality, in the different approach and scope that language must take to record the way that fluctuations of minutiae transform a whole. These poems meditate on what it is simply to look at the world, without judgment, without intervention, without appropriation. Swensen’s lyric observations, lilting and delicate, distill the act of seeing.
Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.
It is the subtle crash of verbs and nouns in this book which undoes the potentially simple observations from a train and makes landscape, light, color, and language open themselves to new possibilities. Swensen’s uses of timed instants pitted against instants of prolonged time play with the seen, so transformations are not just visual, but temporal. Landscapes are stopped, shrunken, held in the palm of a hand.