Böcker av Cole Swensen

Der 1838 gegründete Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn zählt zu den meistbesuchten Attraktionen von New York und war wegweisend für viele weitere Parkfriedhöfe in den USA. Auf knapp zwei Quadratkilometern beeindrucken prachtvolle Landschaften mit Grabarchitektur und Statuen von Weltrang. Mit Ihrer Kamera hat Bethany Eden Jacobson die atemberaubende Landschaft des geschichtsträchtigen Friedhofs in allen Jahreszeiten eingefangen.In Farb- und Schwarz-Weiß-Fotografien zeigt die New Yorker Fotografin Bethany Eden Jacobson die erhabene Schönheit des Green-Wood Cemetery: jahrhundertealten Bäumen, verwitterte Gradstätten und viktorianische Statuen. Eine visuelle Meditation über die Vergänglichkeit des Lebens und der Harmonie der Natur. Kunstvolle Fotoreproduktionen auf handgeschöpftem Papier wandelt die Aufnahmen in einfühlsame und inspirierende Kunstwerke. Der begleitende Text von Cole Swensen greift die emotionalen Bilder auf und lässt ein lyrisches Wechselspiel zwischen Wort und Bild entstehen.

"Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in The Orphic Voice, describes as ...a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward. That could serve as worthy blurb for And And And. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a prima poieia, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn't define, doesn't categorize, doesn't lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other..." -Dan Beachy-Quick

A collection of hybrid essays on landscape and visual art that implicitly recognizes our obligations to the earth and presents the earth in ways that make others recognize them too.

On Walking On looks outward onto-or rather, walks through-the work of various writers for whom walking was or is an important element of daily life. The number of writers who were or are serious walkers is striking, and the connection goes back to antiquity, more recently including Woolf, Nerval, Sand, Debord, Sebald, and many others.

A poetry-essay meditation on the cultural and physical forces of the river

A chapbook of prose poems on existence and the self, with French on facing pages

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, Andre Le Notre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Notre 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 "e;le notre"e; means "e;ours."e; Whereas all of Le Notre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "e;le notre"e; to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

"e;Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face"e; (p. 65)The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society's actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.