Such Rich Hour

by Cole Swensen

Covering a variety of subjects from the plague and the first danse macabre to the development of perspective and recipes for pigments, the poems in Cole Swensen's new collection are set in fifteenth-century France and explore the end of the medieval world and its gradual transition into the Renaissance. The collection is loosely based on the calendar illuminations from the Trs Riches Heures, the well-known book of hours, and uses them to explore the ways that the arts visual and verbal interact with history, at times prefiguring it, at times shaping it, and at times offering wry commentary or commiseration.

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2001

About the author

Cole Swensen (b. 1955— ) in Kentfield near San Francisco, Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of over ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. A translator, editor, copywriter, and teacher, she received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz before going on to become the now-Previous Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. Her work is considered Postmodern and post-Language school, though she maintains close ties with many of the original authors from that group (such as Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein,) as well as poets from all over the US and Europe. In fact, her work is hybrid in nature, sometimes called lyric-Language poetry emerging from a strong background in the poetic and visual art traditions of both the USA and France and adding to them her own vision.

Reviews

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

COUNT ON COLE Swenson for an original and surprising starting point for a collection, in this case the famously gorgeous late medieval illuminated manuscript, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, commissioned in 1411 by the duke himself (third-born son of King Jean II) but not completed at the time of his death in 1416--not completed, indeed, until 1440, by hands other than those of the originally commissioned painters, the Brothers Limbourg, who also died in 1416. And then the whole thing was lost for a few hundred years, to be rediscovered in a girls' boarding school in Genoa in 1855.

The manuscript is organized around the months of the year and depicts a serene, prosperous, well-ordered world, which the territory and court of the Duc de Berry supposedly was. Actually, early fifteenth century France was anything but serene, prosperous, and well-ordered. A lot of its territory was occupied by England, whose royal family was aggressively pursuing its claim to the crown of France, and the French royal family was enmeshed in a bloody intra-familial feud worthy of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, rival popes...that 15th century.

Swenson's poems represent both the beautiful world seen in the manuscript's illuminations ("the forest whole in its gentle bow / mirrored in color / love was something we invented/ / and perfectly enacted") and the terrible world in which the book was produced ("Choose a bridge in broad daylight, The Yonne drifting / by below while Tanguy du Châtel / simply kills him. Others lean / on the railing and watch"). Often the poems represent as well the processes that producing the book required, vellum and brushes and paints, the material bases by which it exists at all.

The book follows the manuscript in being organized around the months, but the poems do not make the mistake of trying to sound or look like facsimiles of 15th century poetry. They are thoroughly contemporary, disjunctive and paratactic, sometimes in ways that suggest erasures. The further I got into the book, the more sense this choice made, as it seemed to reflect how our knowledge of the world of 15th century France was necessarily fragmentary, composed of brightly colored but disconnected pieces that we had to assemble as best we could on our own, imagining our way into the lacunae, the empty spaces. Such Rich Hour steers well clear of pastiche, finding its own way to recreate the beauty of the art and world it honors.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

The basic techniques
of apiculture haven't changed since etc. and then we go into
the anatomy of the bee—how its legs frangere in their private foray, splinter like the feathered bones inside the finger drifting. And how, and then how, the laces drawn through error and we hear, throughout the threaded hallways, their movements leadened into season and that bees were first domesticated by nomadic tribes on the Asian Steppes who used them initially as compasses, and then as maps, my lady, we live in a tiny, tiny world.

—February 1: Winter Agriculture, p22

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly ambitious, sophisticated collection. Probably not accessible for the average reader. Excellent read for those in MFA programs, with her list of sources, words smattered on the page, and sentences that are curiously composed on the level of syntax.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Give me your city in a million little bones. Mine / she says were removed without the slightest negative effect & the skin re- / sewn with the blindman's stitch.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

i lost my mind reading this. apeshit

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my top ten of all time.

[Derek H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite.