Cole Swenson, _Such Rich Hour_

 COUNT ON COLE Swenson for an original and surprising starting point for a collection, in this case the famously gorgeous late medieval illuminated manuscript, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, commissioned in 1411 by the duke himself (third-born son of King Jean II) but not completed at the time of his death in 1416--not completed, indeed, until 1440, by hands other than those of the originally commissioned painters, the Brothers Limbourg, who also died in 1416. And then the whole thing was lost for a few hundred years, to be rediscovered in a girls' boarding school in Genoa in 1855.

The manuscript is organized around the months of the year and depicts a serene, prosperous, well-ordered world, which the territory and court of the Duc de Berry supposedly was. Actually, early fifteenth century France was anything but serene, prosperous, and well-ordered. A lot of its territory was occupied by England, whose royal family was aggressively pursuing its claim to the crown of France, and the French royal family was enmeshed in a bloody intra-familial feud worthy of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, rival popes...that 15th century.

Swenson's poems represent both the beautiful world seen in the manuscript's illuminations ("the forest whole in its gentle bow / mirrored in color / love was something we invented/ / and perfectly enacted") and the terrible world in which the book was produced ("Choose a bridge in broad daylight, The Yonne drifting / by below while Tanguy du Châtel / simply kills him. Others lean / on the railing and watch"). Often the poems represent as well the processes that producing the book required, vellum and brushes and paints, the material bases by which it exists at all.

The book follows the manuscript in being organized around the months, but the poems do not make the mistake of trying to sound or look like facsimiles of 15th century poetry. They are thoroughly contemporary, disjunctive and paratactic, sometimes in ways that suggest erasures. The further I got into the book, the more sense this choice made, as it seemed to reflect how our knowledge of the world of 15th century France was necessarily fragmentary, composed of brightly colored but disconnected pieces that we had to assemble as best we could on our own, imagining our way into the lacunae, the empty spaces. Such Rich Hour steers well clear of pastiche, finding its own way to recreate the beauty of the art and world it honors.