Try (Iowa Poetry Prize) [Paperback]

Cole Swensen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Iowa Poetry Prize | Publication Date: March 1, 1999

The poems in Cole Swensen's Try, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, explore the intersection of writing with the visual arts, particularly late medieval and early Renaissance paintings. They also explore writing as a visual vehicle, both as a pattern across a field and as a catalyst for imagery.

Looking at the paintings themselves involves examining the way that they make meaning and, in contrast, the way that words make meaning of them and themselves--what happens when you have a representation of a representation? All the poems in this collection weave in and out of proximity to visual work, sometimes from the distance of a gallery viewer, sometimes as a character in the painting itself. Issues of narrative sequences and time float through the collection but are always subordinate to the play and rule of language on the page.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The world fleshed forth in oil paint, from Giotto to Joseph Albers, is meticulously essayed in the mixed-genre ekphraseis of Swensen's sixth full-length collection since 1984. Though the medieval and early Renaissance tableaux she focuses on are almost entirely composed in the restricted vocabulary of Christian iconography, Swensen regards them with a worldly eye, using her role as "translator" of the worksAfrom religious past to secular present, from image to textAto explore an ethics of human immanence. Addressing herself to one in a countless string of mid-millenium representations of "the Flight into Egypt," for instance, Swensen finds "that the holy family enters not a heavenly but a very worldly world, a world just like ours except that it's not and that it can't be reached." As with the gulf between the visual and the verbal dimensions, what the mind posits as an inviolable border ("it can't be reached"), the body is ever violatingAtranslating, tryingAin practice. In a literally unguarded moment, the intangible yields to an insatiably human craving for contact: "She touched the painting/ as soon as the guard// turned his back." This illicit gesture discloses the very essence of Swensen's project, her daring try at a communion of flesh and canvas, word and image, art and life. FYI: Try was one of three works awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1998, along with Bin Ramke's Wake ($10.95 136p ISBN 0-87745-658-5) and Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour ($10.95 96p ISBN 0-87745-664-X).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Cole Swensen's beautifully exact and visionary meditations on specific paintings and sculptures give the venerable art of ekphrasis a new meaning. Whether focusing on a Siennese altarpiece, a twentieth-century sculpture, or a river scene in the Loire Valley, Swensen sees with an uncanny X-ray vision that becomes the inward gaze. 'The difference,' as Gertrude Stein once put it, 'is spreading.'" -- Marjorie Perloff

"Quite honestly, I think Cole Swensen is a genius and her work, among that of my immediate contemporaries, is absolutely vital to me. Swensen often sustains and develops in her poems a major tone, a delicate meditative aura with subtle modulations. The inherent radiance of Try lights up not only the paintings which are the poems' ostensible subject material but layers of perception." -- Forrest Gander

Auguste Rodin, Christ And The Magdalene, 1894 (1)
Auguste Rodin, Christ And The Magdalene, 1894 (2)
Auguste Rodin, Christ And The Magdalene, 1894 (3)
Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, 1886-98
Cove
Deictic
Dove
Even
Eventail
The Flight Into Egypt
Here (1)
Here (2)
Liberty (1)
Liberty (2)
Liberty (3)
Noli Me Tangere
Noli Me Tangere, Unknown Spanish Painter, Early Fourteenth Century
Story One
Story Three
Story Two
There
Trilogy: One
Trilogy: Three
Trilogy: Two
Whatever Happened To Their Eyes
Woven
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

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Product Details

• Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877456593
• ISBN-13: 978-0877456599
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,668,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars sort of, October 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Try (Iowa Poetry Prize) (Paperback)

I sort of understand this book and I sort of don't. Some of the poems in it stun me with their elegance, transcenence and dexterity; others merely stun me with their flatness. I feel like Swensen is up to something very very cool here but I don't always get it, and I feel like I don't know enough about the paintings.

Still, the first poem in the volume is amazing, and Swensen's ability to mix innovative and more lyrical styles is remarkable.