ENGLISH

Ours

Book information

Publisher
University of California Press
Year
2008
ISBN
9780520941564
DOI
10.1525/9780520941564
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
131 kB (134539 bytes)
Series
New California Poetry; 24
Pages
118\113
Library
degruyter.com
Time added
2023-08-21 18:25:34

Description

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

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