Meditations on the alchemical properties of light within
history, art, and the human experience.
Author Biography
Cole Swensen’s ninth collection
of poetry, Goest, was published in spring of 2004
by Alice James Books. Earlier works have been awarded a
National Poetry Series selection, Sun & Moon’s
New American Writing Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San
Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and a Pushcart
Prize. Her next collection, The Book of a Hundred Hands,
will be published by University of Iowa Press in 2005. She
also translates contemporary French fiction, art criticism,
and poetry; recent books include Olivier Cadiot’s
Future, Former, Fugitive, Pierre Alferi’s
OXO, and Jean Frémon’s The Island
of the Dead, which won the 2004 PEN USA Literary Award
for Translation. She has received grants from the Association
Beaumarchais and the French Bureau du Livre.
from
Five Landscapes
One
This is an outline for a project on the relationship between
landscape and time,
the latter turning physical, equivocal, equal. I'm on a
train.
The whole window and speed, vertile, vertige. It
will be
an expository piece and not an evocation. Look down there
in the field, a hundred people, a festival, a lake, a summer,
a hundred
thousand fields, all your versions, a woman places her hand
on the small of a man's back in the middle of the crowd
and leaves it.
Two
A wedding in a field-the old saying: it's good luck to be
seen
from a train dressed in white, you must be looking the other
way, so many things work
only if you're looking away. A woman in a field is walking
away.
Gardens early in the evening. Trees
planted a few hundred years ago to line a road no longer
there
. The water is pale teal, light, field after field. Spire,
steeple, sea
of trees that line roads long disappeared along with their
houses, which were
great houses in their time.
