The post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard painted, among other things, dozens of paintings of windows. Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
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From Publishers Weekly
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.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry.”—Library Journal
"Cole Swensen's The Glass Age is a masterwork . . . 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 places her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."—Ron Silliman
"Seeing is believing sometimes, but believing is almost always seeing, at least according to Cole Swensen’s long meditation on glass, windows, vision, and various writers and artists who have used these in their work, especially Bonnard, Apollinaire, Wittgenstein, Hammershøi, Saki, and the Lumière brothers. Swensen provides us with an invaluable postmodern retrofit of Keats’s magic casements."—John Ashbery
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More 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
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