Try

“Cole Swensen's beautifully exact and visionary meditations on specific paintings and sculptures give the venerable art of ekphrasis a new meaning. Whether focusing on a Siennese altarpiece, a twentieth-century sculpture, or a river scene in the Loire Valley, Swensen sees with an uncanny X-ray vision that becomes the inward gaze. 'The difference,' as Gertrude Stein once put it, 'is spreading.'”—Marjorie Perloff

“Quite honestly, I think Cole Swensen is a genius and her work, among that of my immediate contemporaries, is absolutely vital to me. Swensen often sustains and develops in her poems a major tone, a delicate meditative aura with subtle modulations. The inherent radiance of Trylights up not only the paintings which are the poems' ostensible subject material but layers of perception.”—Forrest Gander

“The world fleshed forth in oil paint, from Giotto to Joseph Albers, is meticulously essayed in the mixed-genre ekphraseis of Swensen's sixth full-length collection since 1984. Though the medieval and early Renaissance tableaux she focuses on are almost entirely composed in the restricted vocabulary of Christian iconography, Swensen regards them with a worldly eye, using her role as 'translator' of the works—from religious past to secular present, from image to text—to explore an ethics of human immanence. Addressing herself to one in the countless string of mid-millennium representations of 'the Flight into Egypt,' for instance, Swensen finds 'that the holy family enters not a heavenly but a very worldly world, a world just like ours except that it's not and that it can't be reached.' As with the gulf between the visual and the verbal dimensions, what the mind posits as an inviolable border ('it can't be reached'), the body is ever violating—translating, trying—in practice. In a literally unguarded moment, the intangible yields to an insatiably human craving for contact: 'She touched the painting / as soon as the guard / turned his back.' This illicit gesture discloses the very essence of Swensen's project, her daring try at a communion of flesh and canvas, word and image, art and life.”—Publishers Weekly

“Cole Swensen's sixth book, Try, winner of the 1999 University of Iowa Poetry Prize, is an extended and considerable meditation on paintings and sculptures ranging from the fourteenth to the twentieth century…unlike many poets before her who have practiced the art of ekphrasis by describing or illuminating the visual, Swensen is interested in the representation of representation, in examining not only the way painting makes meaning, but the way language makes meaning of that meaning. Above all, she is interested in the process and procedures of perception…Our speed of sight, the filmic surface of contemporary vision, our ability to pan, scan, splice, fragment, and make whole again, are made manifest in Try. By the book's end, we are ultimately caught in the gaze of looking at ourselves.”—Boston Review