Cole Swensen, _Gravesend_

WE COULD DO a lot worse than Cole Swensen as Greatest Living American Poet, actually. Just read this from 2012 as part of a general march backward from On Walking On, and it's another good one.

This one too has a conceptual center, reads as a project. It's organized around three questions:

1) Have you ever seen a ghost?
2) How did Gravesend get its name?
3) What do you think a ghost is?

As with Gave and On Walking On, I liked the way Swensen folded history and tradition in with what comes across as direct observation/reportage. The form is sometimes reminiscent of D. A. Powell, I'd say, but the fissures into which the syntax sometimes disappears, the way the resultant gaps structure the discourse, seem more Swensenian than anything else.

She's not really a very excerpt-able poet, but the final section has a lot of poems I think would work well on their own: "Cicatrice," "Traveling Ghost," "And Are Ghosts," "Haint Blue," and this one, just called "Ghosts":

are houses.      (The places we exceed ourselves can live.)     And every house
is a guest.     I live in an old one.      I watch it move.        "I am moved," I say
at inappropriate times. And then must say "I'm sorry"      though not to whom