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.