Cole Swensen’s new collection of poetry, Gravesend, is a meditation on ghosts and ghost stories. It comes on the heels of several strong offerings from Swensen, a prolific fixture in the American poetry scene, that have taken something of an archival (and if I may say so, a delightfully nerdy) turn, dealing with such figures as André le Notre, William Kent, and John Rocque (eighteenth-century cartographers and landscape designers, in case that wasn’t obvious). Gravesend, for its part, maintains a thematic focus on the titular town in the U.K., situated at the mouth of the Thames and as such historically a last point of contact with terra firma for Britons departing to the continent or the new world.
Read Full Article »
