Cole Swensen's Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat Books, 2015)

Some favourite passages from Swensen's new book. I so look forward to her reading tonight at Burdall's Yard in Bath--it begins at 8 p.m.--join us!


Light. All accident. Across a rolling green, soft in animals.

*

Stream down sun in little coins.

*

A church too big for its hill. And cows easing down the slope. Slows its calm, and
More little sun goes on among selves.

*

                                                                                                                          A
Train across open land opens night. (A train lands all night across an open field.)

*

        Tree with light painted on. Then tree with points of dark which
Are birds or fruit that build slowly up into a night.

*

As the eye strikes a far thing, a
Small thing, a thing at this distance becomes distance alive all alone.

*

                                                                                                  Evening results
In a motion of sorts, a sort of splintering air.

*

                  Mistletoe crowding the emptiness of the empty branches
Of emptied trees.

*

              Making the water walk over the meadow like a line of bare
Poplars walks over a field.

*

The sun is a thrush, thrust up against, is falling in sheets, it falls in and sees....

*

You slide the screens to change the world.

*

                                                                         Season extant, season
Alarmed. The surface of water: a matter of light.

*

Birds toward the sea, a sea of them. 

*

The lights of a landing plane the streams of lights lining a road of a town the lights
Of a single light of a farm. Everything cannot be light, a light, we pass through
Miles of dark.

*

Down. To a sound, which has no shore.

*

Rain rains down upon rain.

*

                                                                                                                                Huge
Piles of leaves in the live sky burning the piles of flames into light dying in the sun.

*

                          The man across from me slightly shakes. He thinks
It's his hands. He shakes, and then he shakes them.

*

                                                                         Raw, strong roads that
Sweep the wind.



I found the easiest way to purchase Landscapes on a Train in the UK was to purchase it from Abe Books.