Ours (Volume 24)

New California Poetry

by Cole Swensen

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

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Cole Swensen (b. 1955— ) in Kentfield near San Francisco, Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of over ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. A translator, editor, copywriter, and teacher, she received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz before going on to become the now-Previous Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. Her work is considered Postmodern and post-Language school, though she maintains close ties with many of the original authors from that group (such as Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein,) as well as poets from all over the US and Europe. In fact, her work is hybrid in nature, sometimes called lyric-Language poetry emerging from a strong background in the poetic and visual art traditions of both the USA and France and adding to them her own vision.

Reviews

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aspects of Swensen’s book remain problematic for me. Ours left me feeling a bit chilly perhaps because the 17th century formal gardens in and around Paris, particularly the gardens of Versailles, which are the poetry’s pretext, it’s raison-d’être, largely leave me cold as well. Beyond my disaffection for such cultural artifacts of autarchy, it may be the attentiveness to language for its own sake that Swensen’s poetry so artfully enacts that discomfits. I look for fissures and find very few, but such cracks are what most interest me in her work. I’m not talking about fragmentation when I say “fissure.” There are certainly gaps, ellipses, white space, and broken syntax in the poetry. What I’m looking for are rough spots, where artfulness and artifice give way, and energy percolates through. Perhaps a moment where the poet doesn’t have complete control over the work. That may be what bothers me: Swensen’s poetry creates an impression of complete control, and complete control always disturbs me. She doesn't appear to be taking any risks. A blurb by Ron Silliman on the book jacket almost reads as a critique although I don't think he intended it as such; Silliman calls Swensen, “A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson.” He goes on to “place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have.” Did he really say and mean “facile”? 17th century French royal and aristocratic gardens are models of the geometric, the overly-interpreted and overly-thought. They were (and to a large extent still are) manicured and managed to the nth degree, artifice carved from Nature. Interestingly, and certainly intentionally on Swensen’s part, the process of constructing such formal gardens mirrors the formal process of constructing poetry “about” such gardens. Her honed craftiness, her seasoned artfulness seem just as intent upon perfection as were those of Le Nôtre, the "happy" and "kind man" who designed the gardens under Louis XIV. The undecided is the antithesis of the formal French garden and it is this lack of undecidedness that leaves me somewhat dissatisfied with the poetry. The terrain that Swensen maps, and her poetry is nothing but topographical in its attention to surface detail, is fully instructed, 100% made. Every clod of dirt, precise.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always admired Cole Swensen a lot. I've heard her read, and she has that soothing NPR authority to her voice, and it's in the voice of the poems on the page, too. But sometimes reading her books is like going to a conference in a field not your own. You know everything being said is smart and provocative and influential, but it seems to all happen in someone else's realm of reference and meaning. I've found her scholarliness overrides everything else at times, especially in the last couple books. Not enough to stop me from admiring her -- but at times to make me stop reading her. But this book...

...It's all about gardens and mostly a particular designer, Le Notre... and about halfway through the second section (it does need a little time to build), I realized I was in love. She has an abiding wit and cleverness that deepens into beauty and just a haunting about-life, about-everything truth, even as it skims over obscure figures of the 18th century or distant royals or just their manicured gardens. I don't know how it happens, but it's natural as a fruit ripening (and there's your inevitable gardening metaphor). Maybe I got caught up initially because I once tried to write my own series of garden poems, but it quickly moved beyond any kind of kinship to just total absorption. And it's funny. I actually laughed out loud at a number of passages ("the fine ladies walk/at a pace that makes/topiary make sense"). Someone passing by might have thought I was reading the latest Sedaris book, not avante-garde poetry.

There's still a syntactical remove in these poems (Swensen's sentences never seem to land). But where that has sometimes felt distancing in her other books, here it feels merely like part of a kaleidoscopic design built into the poems.

This is my new Book To Worship.

[Emily Wolahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent. Highly recommended!

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, perfect for any Francophile (like myself). I loved being immersed in Cole Swensen's magnificent collection of gently striking poems. Centering on French gardener, André Le Nôtre, this work explores systems of garden design, history, and culture. Asking questions about equality of spaces: can we take once royal spaces and make them public? I especially liked learning that Le Nôtre was a happy man, as the book has a motif of happiness being connected to the work of gardening (or really the work of doing anything well).

I live in Buffalo, NY, a city with parks designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and enjoy running through these public green spaces. My city also has an annual garden walk, which allows curious neighbors to walk through each other's gardens, oohing and awing over lilies and coy ponds and little spaces to sit amongst the flowers. I wanted to read "Ours" because I have become curious about gardening and garden spaces.

To me, "Ours" points out that the French hold a different view on wild spaces. American's concept of wilderness is entirely different. Thanks, in large part, to President Theodore Roosevelt, we have public parks which to explore, to drive our cars through, to camp. We have the great American west. I feel the French concept of green spaces is more manicured and designed. The human touch is more evident, and also, the touch of a King designing something as grand as his own opinion of himself.

The next time I am in France, I hope to explore some French gardens as the last time I was there, I walked through Jarden des Plantes and loved the swirly, intricate style of this place.

I am returning this book to the library, but have thoroughly enjoyed it and may check it out again in a year or so, to see how I read it then. Thank you Cole Swensen for writing this gorgeous book.

[Kozbi BC · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is scholarly, informed poetry that reduces the role of the speaker and increases emphasis on the subject. I enjoyed it but found it a bit cold.

"We thought
the world was warm, was orange, and hung
ripe among the leaves around us."

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

"all these kings
who search their pockets
and look up asking
why am I dying"

[Izzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so freaking beautiful

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book. Swensen does something interesting here in that she renders her historical narrative somewhere between the lyrical-local of a writer like Claudia Emerson (a poet concerned with the historical of a given place, but weaving complete "fictions" out of the land), and the didactic-local of someone like Susan Suntree (whose poetical-historical, research driven explorations of place push her writing more towards the academic through her novel poetic form).

Swensen does her own research about French formal gardens with the intense passion of an intellectual, but mollifies any potential didactic bluntness with a lyricism that separates her writing from many others of her LANGUAGE generation in order to immerse the reader in a world wholly her own, but still very recognizable. Indeed, it's as symmetrical and balanced an experience in this sense as walking through one of those 17th century French gardens (if you've ever been lucky enough to do so): Here, nature is bent, coaxed, and mathematically measured all the while allowing for the air to be perfumed by its inherent wildness...the Life Force is always present behind her machinery.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh snap, are these collages beautiful. Like Goest did for electric light,
this book rummages through history books, found encyclopedia language, and old
odd accounts of human interaction for a book all about, well, French gardens.
Beautiful? Beautiful. Effortless, as light as rice paper. Everything in the New
California Poetry series is worth a look; this is one of my favorites of theirs
ever.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

So elegant, crystalline but at the same time so very, very cerebral, removed, almost cold.

"Everyone has one gesture or expression
that shows them outside of time,
which is to say, at whatever single second of their lives struck a precise
equilibrium between mind and face (time and space)"

[Elizabeth Metzger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, I want to move in with this book. I never want to stop reading this book. The words revolve, big and round, and take up the whole space of your mouth. Meaning slips in and it globes, sweetly, smartly, I'm all shiny-eyed and ready to buy this book presents.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another fabulous themed collection from Swensen--French gardens filtered through her scalpel-like lyric hand...

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

cole swensen is poetry for librarians. this time she's researching seventeenth century french gardens. and so, so gorgeously. i would like to visit an orangery before i die.

[Megan]

Cole S.' work epitomizes the allure of scholarship; plunge into your subject and emerge, changed. Many lovelinesses here.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nor was I allowed to enter the garden--I stood at its edge and watched it unravel / and waited / for it to arrive. / / A garden is a tide. / / A garden is a tithe.

[Juli Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

bleak, distant, mysterious, and scholarly.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting and informative but not exactly thrilling