Ours (New California Poetry) (Volume 24) - Hardcover

Swensen, Cole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520254635 ISBN 13: 9780520254633

Publisher: University of California Press, 2008

Synopsis

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

About this title

About the Author

Cole Swensen is the author of eleven previous books of poetry. She is also a translator and has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. Her poetry has won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

From the Back Cover

"A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson--I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."―Ron Silliman, author of The Age of Huts (compleat)

From the Inside Flap

"A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson--I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."—Ron Silliman, author of The Age of Huts (compleat)

Reviews

Longtime Swensen fans will not be surprised to find a myriad of ideas and directions on a single subject—French gardens, this time—in her 12th collection. She has similarly treated hands, odd inventions, paintings and other subjects in previous books. Created for the nobility and now mostly for public usage, gardens here become all-purpose metaphors. A garden is a tide, writes Swensen; elsewhere it's a letter, an allergy, a tithe. The book's title is a translation of the last name of Andre de Notre, the man considered to be the father of the French formal garden. The poems, even as they are peppered with detailed histories (In 1675, Louis XIV made Andre Le Notre a noble), are free to go anywhere. In Marie (1573–1642), Marie Medici, the wife of Henry IV, finds herself at the Luxembourg Gardens in the summer of 2007: She stood a full minute, shocked and then started screaming./ The rue d'Assas has cut off the entire northwest sector, and half the trees are gone. This may be the most engaging and delightful of Swensen's recent projects. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520254635
• ISBN 13: 9780520254633
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 118