Items related to Ours: Volume 24 (New California Poetry)

Ours: Volume 24 (New California Poetry) - Hardcover

Swensen, Cole

 
9780520254633: Ours: Volume 24 (New California Poetry)

Synopsis

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 'le notre' means 'ours'. 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 'le notre' to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

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About the Author

Cole Swensen is the author of eleven previous books of poetry. She is also a translator and has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. Her poetry has won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and she teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

From the Back Cover

"A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson--I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."—Ron Silliman, author of The Age of Huts (compleat)

From the Inside Flap

"A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson--I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."—Ron Silliman, author of The Age of Huts (compleat)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.