Gravesend (New California Poetry): Volume 36 - Softcover

Swensen, Cole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520273176 ISBN 13: 9780520273177

Publisher: University of California Press, 2012

Synopsis

"Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face" (p. 65) The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society's actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.

About this title

Review:

"A book-length meditation on ghosts and ghost stories in Swensen's haunting style."--Publishers Weekly (01/23/2012)

"It is poetry that honestly admits the inchoate, affirms mystery and responds to successive readings: it is alive."--The Volta (05/01/2014)

About the Author:

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve previous books of poetry, including the acclaimed Ours (UC Press). She is also coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0520273176
• ISBN 13: 9780520273177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96