Try (Iowa Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Swensen, Cole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877456593 ISBN 13: 9780877456599

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1999

Synopsis

Cole Swensen's beautifully exact and visionary meditations on specific paintings and sculptures give the venerable art of "ekphrasis" a new meaning. Whether focusing on a Siennese altar-piece, a 20th-century sculpture, or a river scene in the Loire Valley, Swensen "sees" with an uncanny X-ray vision that becomes the inward gaze. 'The difference, ' as Gertrude Stein once put it, 'is spreading.'

About this title

About the Author:

Cole Swensen is director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She is the author of five collections of poems, including Noon, which won a New American Writing Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

The world fleshed forth in oil paint, from Giotto to Joseph Albers, is meticulously essayed in the mixed-genre ekphraseis of Swensen's sixth full-length collection since 1984. Though the medieval and early Renaissance tableaux she focuses on are almost entirely composed in the restricted vocabulary of Christian iconography, Swensen regards them with a worldly eye, using her role as "translator" of the worksAfrom religious past to secular present, from image to textAto explore an ethics of human immanence. Addressing herself to one in a countless string of mid-millenium representations of "the Flight into Egypt," for instance, Swensen finds "that the holy family enters not a heavenly but a very worldly world, a world just like ours except that it's not and that it can't be reached." As with the gulf between the visual and the verbal dimensions, what the mind posits as an inviolable border ("it can't be reached"), the body is ever violatingAtranslating, tryingAin practice. In a literally unguarded moment, the intangible yields to an insatiably human craving for contact: "She touched the painting/ as soon as the guard// turned his back." This illicit gesture discloses the very essence of Swensen's project, her daring try at a communion of flesh and canvas, word and image, art and life. FYI: Try was one of three works awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1998, along with Bin Ramke's Wake ($10.95 136p ISBN 0-87745-658-5) and Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour ($10.95 96p ISBN 0-87745-664-X).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0877456593
• ISBN 13: 9780877456599
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 92