Summer is often full of journeys as lovely weather and longer days conspire to stir dreams of road tripping. Allowances are made for traffic, and everyone prays that the weather holds. Then the plan goes sideways, and with the disappointment comes a bitter lesson about the futility of all hopes. Yet there sometimes also lurks a welcome surprise, some unforeseen beauty or pleasure. These unlikely joys are at the heart of “Veer,” the latest volume from the Providence poet Cole Swensen.
A Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, Swensen is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and a translator of French contemporary poetry. In 2024, she won the National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of “And the Street” (2024) by the late Pierre Alferi. In these poems, Alferi applied a minimalist and formally oriented sensibility to the details of urban life. Swensen picks up this thread in “Veer” as she casts her eye over the cityscape, attentive to the sounds and movements that cause us to stop and look, to veer briefly off the course of an overscheduled day.
“Veer” consists of 49 prose poems, none longer than a few sentences, sorted into three linked sections called “Tic,” “Tac,” and “Tao.” This series of titles hints strongly at the collection’s theme of movement off course—veering. “Tic” and “Tac,” which seem headed inexorably for the prosaic “Toe,” land surprisingly on the more evocative “Tao.” The sequence veers off course, like the flight path of a crow at play, banking or swooping simply for the pleasure of a change.
Sometimes the veering occurs in Swensen’s images. Her poems are full of fleeting revelations—the eye-catching shadow cast by a sunlit tree on just one day of the year, the equally surprising luminosity of a snowy egret standing perfectly still for just one moment. As these images accumulate, the poems accrue power.
In “Various Gloves,” a light glove, perhaps a bit of hospital trash, takes to the air. “A bit like a balloon, floating off over the tops of trees,” it finally lands in the poet’s entryway, becoming a surprise that she invests with meaning. On the next page, Swensen shifts the scene to a Paris museum, at an exhibition devoted to Marcel Proust, the great novelist of time and memory. One of his calfskin gloves is on display, the “white kid so finely drawn, the fingers no fatter than cigarettes.”
So far, there are just two stops on this poetic itinerary, and the poem’s direction seems unpromising, an equation of a literary relic with a piece of medical trash. That’s when Swensen offers a fresh destination in the form of an arresting image, both dynamic and pastoral, and entirely unexpected: “And yet,” she writes, the Proustian glove is alive with its own history, “still its own animal, the kid of which it was made, the calf, the suede, still grazing in their fields, gathering in their flocks, and wandering off in their five-fingered way through the mist.”
The power here is not just in the imagery. Swensen’s language also veers. In the preceding example, about Proust and the gloves, assonance—those repeating “ays” in “made” and “suede” and “way,” punctuated by the half-rhyme produced by “grazing”—leads the reader along an auditory mazy path, permitting the images to gather like the calves in Swensen’s mist, to accumulate in the reader’s mind as the poem glides to its conclusion, taking the reader along for the ride.
In the sequence I loved the most—the one to which I kept returning—Swensen meditates on a flock of city crows. They arrive, roosting noisily in the trees, every year, heralding its end. “Huge flocks of crows today,” she notes, “haunting their way out of autumn.” As the crows circle and swoop, “austerity comes into being.” Transporting without being pushy, Swensen’s poetry is itself a kind of holiday. It invites readers to get off the clock. “How time wanes,” Swensen writes, wonderingly, “when the mind strays.”
Diane Josefowicz is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction; her most recent book is The Great Houses of Pill Hill, a novel just out from Soho Press. She also writes a monthly books newsletter, What’s That Noise? Learn more and subscribe at: www.dianejosefowicz.com.
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