Cole Swensen, VEER

is a former sun, a warmer form of falling on, fallen now, warmly in grass, while the sun in your hand is a lonelier one, so you hold it more closely, and a light deep inside your body wanders back. (“AN ORANGE”)

The latest from American poet and translator Cole Swensen is the collection VEER (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2026), a collection seemingly produced as the first volume in “The Jean Valentine Series” at Alice James Books, named for the late American poet who died in December, 2020. As the back of the collection offers: “Established in Valentine’s name, the series celebrates women-identifying poets in mid- to late-career whose work embodies the qualities that defined her own: risk-taking in form and vision, emotional and intellectual daring, and a commitment to language that illuminates and lingers. It honors poets who surprise us, who move us, who open new pathways in poetry. In doing so, the series affirms Valentine’s belief that poetry can be a site of profound listening—an invitation to encounter what is fragile, strange, or holy in the world an in ourselves.” Swensen is, of course, the author of some twenty collections of poetry, the last two decades alone seeing the publication of poetry titles Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], greensward (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) [see my review of such here], Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Stele (Sausalito CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], LANDSCAPES ON A TRAIN (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], Gave (Omnidawn, 2017) [see my review of such here], On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], Art In Time (Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] and And And And (Free Poetry Press, 2022; Shearsman, 2022) [see my review of such here].

Composed across three sections—“TIC,” “TAC” and “TAO”—VEER is a collection of delicately precise prose poems and prose poem sequences that intersperse writing on trees, flowers, oranges, sunlight, sand, egrets, words, story problems, sailboats and crows. Lyric and meditative, the clarity and ease of her lines are composed with a kind of hush: “How time / wanes when the mind strays.” There’s such quiet and fierce intelligence across these poems, as Swensen moves through perception and mapping, turns and sudden turns, offering a new variation on her detailed explorations across landscapes, including gardens, paintings and graveyards. Her work explores ways of seeing and detailed attending, connecting a constellation of minutae. “And then there’s the reflection caught in passing a shopwindow,” she writes, as the second part of the three-part sequence “REFLECTIONS,” “as if the window itself were passing, as if a window is always / something moving past you. What I mean to say is that I was / moved by what I saw on the surface of the window, and that as / I passed it, someone passing right behind me seemed, for just a / second, to be alive inside me.” It is as though Swensen attends a specific detail in depth, so as to better comprehend that bigger picture.

BARE TREES

The structure of trees outlined against sky—their countless extensions all caressing its starkness—it’s November, which lets us see that the trees are actually tracing all the world’s thought-paths throughout the atmosphere—we can only follow them to the ends of their twigs, but they go on in filaments too fine for our eyes and, in fact, extend to the farthest edges of the universe, expanding with it.

 

C.D. Wright, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

Spring & All

Between great hails to the imagination and salvos of opprobrium, William Carlos Williams set one sharp-edged poem after another into the composition of an unframed original. So the one who did not cast off his roots chose the eldest trope in the book, SPRING, to push and pull American poetry into the present tense. Not before he had initiated a willful number of false starts, cranking up anticipation and repeatedly sabotaging expectations. Not before the hectored reader was fetched up “by the road to the contagious hospital,” only then would the first glimpse of grass and “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf” be permitted—at the precise point at which every stick in the refuse emerged particular. Terrifying, as Robert Creeley was given to say.

Reminiscent of the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall for his own take on the essay-poem comes American poet C.D. Wright’s (1949-2016) posthumous collection of prose poem-essays, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon, 2016). Given this collection appears mere weeks after Wright’s unexpected death in January gives the book an extra edge: a twinge of grief, of wondering what might-else-have-come (one can be heartened, slightly, by a 2015 interview in which she mentions two other forthcoming works, as she offered: “A book of poetry ShallCross will be out next year and then Casting Deep Shade, also in prose (with photographer Denny Moers)”). The pieces in the expansively-titled The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All blend a boundary between and through the prose poem and short essay, weave in and out of a variety of books and authors, with repeated sketches on the work of Jean Valentine, William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All (1923), Robert Creeley, Brenda Hillman, Gale Nelson, Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting (1999), René Char and photographer and Wright-collaborator Deborah Luster, as she composes thoughtful, witty, deeply personal and utterly charming poem-essays on craft, style and subject. The ease in which Wright offers insight and commentary are intoxicating, as she seems to explain herself in the short piece “My American Scrawl,” a poem set near the beginning of the book: “Increasingly indecisive, about matters both big and little, I have found that poetry is the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine, to palter or dissemble or quaver or hastily reverse myself. This is the one scene where I advance determined, if not precisely ready, to do battle with what an overly cited Jungian described as the anesthetized heart, the heart that does not react.”

In a Word,

      a World

I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny-side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money. Of course the qualifying adjective nation does exercise an otherwise eventful noun.

As her title, a collage of multiple references, hints, Wright’s The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All is a bricolage from a lively, engaged reader pulling at strands from a variety of corners of American poetry and stitching them together into a comprehensive through-line, one that only she could have constructed. The repetitions of title, subject and author throughout allow for some intriguing movements, such as the half-dozen poems referencing Jean Valentine, for example, that, instead of attempting to contain the complexity of an author’s work in a single piece, expand into a series of facets, each exploring another element or idea in Valentine’s writing. The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All showcases the depth of what we have lost through the author’s sudden death: a restless curiosity, a thoroughly engaged mind, and heart as large as the continent. As Wright writes to open one of the “Jean Valentine, Abridged” poems: “The poems stay resolutely strange. When I say the writing is strange, I mean the writing resides on the positive side of the strangeness axis.” An earlier piece with the same title opens: “When I read Jean Valentine’s poems I fill up with questions, flow over with emotion. I cease, in some ways, to think.” She continues:

It is not that the writing is hermetic; in fact, I believe its entire pitch and purpose is openness. I grasp that the whole life—of loving and losing, erring and righting, reading and thinking, saying and seeing—is faithfully recorded, word for word, and submerged under each elliptic dot. She is “shy of words but desperately true to them,” wrote Seamus Heaney. “Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake,” wrote Adrienne Rich. I think I see what Valentine sees: her own outline and what has settled below. But I am wary of describing it.

Ongoing notes: later May 2015

Like a lot of my stories, that one just followed one momentary thought—What am I doing here, putting odd sentences together and creating some little piece of nonsense, when people are dying on the other side of the world and our government’s going to damnation? It’s something that a lot of artists, I’m sure, feel at one time or another, that they’re wasting time or doing something frivolous. So instead of answering myself and ignoring it, I wrote it out as a little thought. I didn’t know how much value to give to that story, but I showed it to a very serious critic and she liked it, so I decided it passed.

            Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227, The Paris Review

There’s been a ton of activity around here lately, or perhaps there hasn’t; perhaps my time full-time with toddler has shifted my perspective. Who knows? I bake, I wander with wee babe to the park, and the occasional reading even happens. Currently I’m in the midst of a slew of new above/ground press publications for the upcoming semi-annual ottawa small press book fair weekend, on June 12 and 13: might we see you there?

Rose turned eighteen months last week. Her big sister Kate gifted her a “Flash” mask, which means, of course, there can only be blurry photos.

Prince George BC: Rob Budde was good enough to send me a copy of Kara-lee MacDonald’s Eating Matters (Hobo Books, 2015), a chapbook of poems exploring eating disorders and the social pressures/expectations of women. The collage aspect of the collection, very much composed as a single project, is rather interesting. Some pieces might be less effective than others, but the variety and scope of the structure makes the read more than worth it. To see how one might get a copy, check with karaleemacdona@gmail.com

The hardest part is knowing

that she should know better.

It isn’t as if she isn’t educated—

as if she isn’t well-read. She can tell you

what de Beauvoir says,

what Butler says,

what Bordo says.

At the end of the way,

—theory fails

to account for disjunction

between bodily urges and

rational thought.

When the late hour and quiet house

have broken her resolve,

she responds predictably.

A trip to the kitchen before

inducing in the bathroom.

Running water to mask

the sounds.

Philadelphia PA: From Brian Teare’s Albion Books comes Jean Valentine’s small chapbook friend (2015), a collection of lyrics that appear to reference her prior poem for Adrienne Rich, a piece that shares a similar title. An award-winning New York City poet, Valentine is the author of numerous books, and winner of a wide array of awards, from the Wallace Stevens Award and the Shelley Memorial Prize. The short poems in friend are carefully composed and packed tight, while still allowing a particular looseness to breathe between her lines.

MY WORDS TO YOU

My words to you are the stitches in a scarf

I don’t want to finish

maybe it will come to be a blanket

to hold you here

love not gone anywhere

Perhaps extending from that previous piece, these poems explore the attachments between people. She writes of loss and love, and even deeper bonds, such as the final stanza of the poem “AFTER: ISN'T THERE SOMETHING,” that reads:

            I want to go back to you,

who when you were dying said

“There are one or two people you don’t want to

let go of.” Here too, where I don’t let go of you.

Toronto ON: The recently-launched Toronto chapbook publisher, WORDS(ON)PAGES, released a small handful of chapbooks this past spring, including Daniel Scott Tysdal’s THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE (2015), “COMPOSED ON THE OCCASION OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE, WHICH MARKED THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PASSING OF THE GAY MARRIAGE ACT ON JANUARY 18, 1979.”

The discovery? Yes, ma’am, I remember,

clear as day. I was searching the Good Book

for a verse that would really stick it to

the homosexuals. You see, that was how

I thought back in ’77. It was late, which

I don’t remember so much as know. I still

don’t sleep well when travelling, even

though that night I was in Dade Country, only

an eight hour drive from my own bed [laughs].

Dade’s where they were passing that law,

you see, to help the homosexuals. Or stop

hurting them. [Pauses] I don’t recall.

Either way, the lot of us Pastors and Deacons

were madder than mules chewing bees

[laughs], ready to bring down all the light

and fire of the Lord on those heathen

councilors in Miami. And then it

happened. [Pauses]. This I remember

as clear as day. I saw that word and I felt

God’s own great hands wrap me up like

a blanket round a baby and for the first

time I truly felt [pauses] Him, [pauses]

I mean us, us, the power He granted us

with this one word that changed the whole

ballgame: love. It was right there in John’s

First Epistle: “We love because He first loved

us.” I couldn’t believe we had missed it!
Lord forgive us, for centuries! [Laughs.]

And the scriptures were just stuffed with

it. Mark 12:31, “Love your neighbor as

yourself.” Romans 13:8: “Let no debt

remain outstanding, except the continuing

debt to love one another.” (“1. THE FORMER PASTOR MAYHEW RAY”)

Subtitled “EXCERPTS FROM AN ENDLESS ORAL HISTORY,” Tysdal’s five-part poem exists as both celebration and historical warning, utilizing real events for the sake of a lyric-through-accretion. Tysdal’s published poetry to date, which include a small handful of trade collections and small chapbooks, are each constructed in unexpected ways, utilizing collage, the idea of the archive and folded materials to produce highly inventive and incredibly powerful works that, in themselves, question the possibilities of what poetry could be. What is a poem? Tysdal’s work continues to challenge the idea of simply what is possible.