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The Glass Age by Cole Swensen

Sometimes entering into an historical conversation requires the slightest of gestures.

Where most lyric poets accept the bounds of authorship, Cole Swensen often throws her voice across centuries, continents and other authors’ texts. This is not to say, however, that she does not have a unique poetic voice: In spite of displacing the “self” in her works, Swensen’s voice comes through to the reader.

As a poet, Cole Swensen has used subtle and fragmented gestures to place herself within a historical conversation. In order to do this she has often eschewed the lyric poet’s stance of relying heavily on an authoritative “I” and instead builds the internal logic of her works from the materials at hand.

Her 11th collection, The Glass Age, which is composed of three long poem sequences essentially about glass, is no exception to this rule. As in most of Swensen’s recent works, The Glass Age is filled with poetically reworked facts about a subject (in this case, glass) and her poetic interpretations of these facts.

For example, the first sequence begins, “Pierre Bonnard, 1867-1947, painted next to a north facing window. The battle over what constitutes realism was at that moment particularly acute—an emotional thing, such as a cardinal out my window. Could streak away and shatter the composition of the world into a vivid wind in which the world goes astray.” This is a good example of her method: an interesting fact (or biographical image) riffed upon for the larger theme of the book, which interrogates the basic properties of glass primarily through a close reading of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings and the early history of glass greenhouses (as well as many tangentially related topics).

As in her 2004 National Book Award finalist book, Goest, the immense white space of the page is self-referentially used to reinforce her interpretation of the poeticized facts. For example, she writes, “The space in paintings is not paint; it is space.” It’s all very neat, but the critical question is: is it enough?