Influenced by thehistory of landscape painting, Cole Swensen s new book is an experiment in seriality, inthe different approach and scope that language must take to record the waythatfluctuations of minutiae transform a whole.Thesepoems meditate on what it is simply to look at the world, without judgment, without intervention, without appropriation. Swensen s lyric observations, lilting and delicate, distill the act of seeing.
Swensen s poetry documents a penetrating intellectus light of the mind by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent. Anne Waldman"