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Description
The post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard painted, among other things, dozens of paintings of windows. Starting there, this extended poem — part art criticism, part history — considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
About the Author
Cole Swensen is the author of ten previous books of poetry including Goest, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also won the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and a National Poetry Series selection, as well as grants for translating and writing. She is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry. — Library Journal
Cole Swensen's The Glass Age is a masterwork … A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson — I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless … Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly places her among the finest post-avant poets we now have. — Ron Silliman
Seeing is believing sometimes, 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 Ashbery
From The Open Window :
Photography replaced the river, which, due to
unexpected complications, resulted in the Great Age
of the Train. Bonnard started photographing just as
the snapshot became possible. Glass negatives gave
way to strips of film, and the river froze, intact. In
shadow and light, the Seine, said Marthe, standing in
the garden, frame after frame. We are multiplying the
things we can and do see through.
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