Cole Swensen has a new book out and I’m absolutely crazy about it. It’s titled Gravesend, after the town of that name in England. The book is an investigation of that, but also so much more about graves and endings and ghosts and her restless and nimble mind at work.
It’s broken into three sections, “Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?”, “How Did Gravesend Get Its Name?”, and “What Do You Think a Ghost Is?”
Each section has a short prose bit, a few pages long, culled from interviews Swensen conducted with people circling the questions that title each section. The rest of each section is poetry.
It’s one of the things I admire about Swensen’s work, her ability to inhabit a question, and to bring research and her thinking together to chip away at it with the suggestive power of art. It’s the contribution art makes to a subject, full of open spaces.
Anyway, here’s a bit from one of the prose sections, to give you a feel for the tone and voice:
“Ghosts? You’re writing a book on ghosts? This place is full of them. It’s the oldest pub on the river. They say Pocahontas died here. No, I mean here, in this pub, that’s what they say—and why not believe it? No, I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard one. I’ve been down here in the bar, and heard someone walking directly above me when I knew that no one could be up there. And bottles fly off the shelves sometimes, or chairs get up-ended. Everyone who works here has a different story; we all feel them.”
And here’s a poem:
Kent
In the grounds of Bayham Abbey in a garden designed by Repton
a procession of monks just about dusk or just after darkness has fallen
go walking.
Or there was no sadness, just a simple fold in time.
One must be for others a reason to live.
Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold.
Lord Halifax noted it when investigating “the Laughing Man of Wrotham,” who strode into his brother’s room and murdered him night after night
to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and watched him disappear.
There is no cure
for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once
there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death
that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a
death, but that was illusory, too. And all over Kent, someone is still
heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.
Finally, here’s one more poem, that extends the theme a bit. I’m not able to post it here without messing up the form a bit, so I’m including a picture so you can get the feel for how the spaces work.
The Beginnings of the Modern Era
It wasn’t until the ghost story became a genre that ghosts became strangers
denied as they were by a Romantic flagrance so stylized it found itself poised
to the tip of a letter opener and the man holding it in his hand
silhouetted from the back on a promontory over a crevasse, which makes
his sister die of music or the ghost is reduced to an overpowering smell
of the sea and only she can hear it: what we’ve inherited fletcher of tongues
thin in the wind who blinded by now a ghost in fingers is touching them empty
of all its burning And we claim we never knew them living which gets lost in living
and thus the phaeton stopped to pick him up and went on to plunge over the cliff
just as it had done in all its lost every night for the past fifty years
the ghost ship the phantom train the cathedral fear
and how right we are to claim it isn’t ours though it leaves them stranded
or we abandon or we, a screw in a door nailed shut. It isn’t our fault
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