Synopsis
From “The Open Window”:
Photography replaced the river, which, due to
unexpected complications, resulted in the Great Age
of the Train. Bonnard started photographing just as
the snapshot became possible. Glass negatives gave
way to strips of film, and the river froze, intact. In
shadow and light, the Seine, said Marthe, standing in
the garden, frame after frame. We are multiplying the
things we can and do see through.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Cole Swensen is the author of ten previous books of poetry including Goest, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also won the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and a National Poetry Series selection, as well as grants for translating and writing. She is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Reviews
Swensen's recent thematic book-length sequences (on Christian art, archaic inventions and the human hand) combine scholarly meticulousness with a postmodern flair for dislocation, cementing Swensen's reputation as an important experimental writer. Her new collection explores the figurative possibilities of glass: as windows, subjects of paintings, and photographic and cinematic lenses. Three sections of mixed prose and verse poems trace the life and work of modernist painter Pierre Bonnard, whose "work implicitly asks what it is to see, and what it is to look through," interwoven with explorations of other artists and media. Swensen (Goest) makes the case that "a window acts as an inverse prism, gathering the intense pigments of the fractured world back into a clarity of unrestricted light"; by extension, she makes this point about language itself. The same and the opposite could be said of her poems. At times, there is too much history and not enough poetry to convince a reader that "A life-sized window is the size of a life." At her best, however, Swensen draws relationships between disparate elements across time, space and discipline with a magician's touch. Her work continues to meditate on the act, and art, of seeing and saying. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From “The Open Window”:
Photography replaced the river, which, due to
unexpected complications, resulted in the Great Age
of the Train. Bonnard started photographing just as
the snapshot became possible. Glass negatives gave
way to strips of film, and the river froze, intact. In
shadow and light, the Seine, said Marthe, standing in
the garden, frame after frame. We are multiplying the
things we can and do see through.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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The Glass Age
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