es, but believing is almost always seeing, at least according to Cole Swensen’s long meditation on glass, windows, vision, and various writers and artists who have used these in their work, especially Bonnard, Apollinaire, Wittgenstein, Hammershøi, Saki, and the Lumière brothers. Swensen provides us with an invaluable postmodern retrofit of Keats’s magic casements.” —John Ashbery26:T74c,“One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry.” —Library Journal “[Goest] explodes the assumption of the ’empty’ portion of the page, while equally exploring the nature of the ‘filled’ portion of it. What emerges is an absence that is really present around a poem, almost haunting it as its lines jut out into space, inventing a language as it goes…” —Rain Taxi “Swensen uses the slipperiest of language to illuminate, if you will, what we see and how often we don’t see it.” —Sacramento News & Review “Ignore the archaic-sounding title, because Swensen has penned a modern, jazzy collection….[These poems] shape-shift constantly, sometimes building on fragments but always moving fast because of the typography. A sense of history and discovery propel them forward. Highly recommended for all collections.” —Library Journal “Delicately speculative, as if forced to take in the myriad conditions surrounding and evinced by things, Cole Swensen in this new book undertakes meticulous descriptions. But the poems, while subtle, are also blazing. Swensen is unafraid of what’s happening. There is enormous grace in these poems, there is also serious daring. The pleasure of reading them is intense.” —Lyn Hejinian “Goest, sonorous with a hovering “ghost” which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the “whites” of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating “intellectus”—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.” —Anne Waldman27:T44d,"This volume collects important examples of Greek literary portraiture.". "The Characters of Theophrastus consists of thirty fictional sketches of men who are each dominated by a single fault, such as arrogance, boorishness, or superstition. Unassuming in style, his character sketches nonetheless bear resemblance to the vivid figures of the period's New Comedy. The Hellenistic poet Herodas wrote mimes, a popular Greek entertainment in which one actor or a small group portrayed a situation from everyday urban life, concentrating on depiction of character rather than on plot. Here too in a new text and translation are substantial portions of the mimes of Sophron, a Syracusan of the 5th century B.C. whose work Plato is said to have enjoyed, as well as a selection of anonymous mime fragments.". "The extant work of Sophron and the anonymous mime fragments are newly added to the Loeb Classical Library in this edition. And Jeffrey Rusten and Ian Cunningham have updated their editions of Theophrastus and Herodas (both first published in 1993) in light of the latest scholarship."--BOOK JACKET.28:T4ce,Du Fu (712–770) is one of the undisputed geniuses of Chinese poetry—still universally admired and read thirteen centuries after his death. Now David Young, author of Black Lab, and well known as a translator of Chinese poets, gives us a sparkling new translation of Du Fu’s verse, arranged to give us a tour of the life, each “chapter” of poems preceded by an introductory paragraph that situates us in place, time, and circumstance. What emerges is a portrait of a modest yet great artist, an ordinary man moving and adjusting as he must in troubled times, while creating a startling, timeless body of work. Du Fu wrote poems that engaged his contemporaries and widened the path of the lyric poet. As

Books by Cole Swensen

Readers also follow