Ours

This book explores gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, Andreacute; Le Nocirc;tre. While these poems focus on such classical examples as Versailles, which Le Nocirc;tre created for his principal employer, Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. In bright and vivid imagery, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public vs. private property asking, who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question in this case because in French, the phrase "le nocirc;tre" means "ours," and while all of Le Nocirc;tre's gardens were designed and built for royalty and the aristocracy, today most of them are public parks and thus very much ours, but in a way that makes us continually define who "we" are. Much of Le Nocirc;tre's work had a playful edge-he delighted in tricks of perspective and fanciful fountains-which is echoed in these poems through leaps of language and logic, bringing to the page the play of light, sound, scent, and sight that forms the heart of any garden. Swensen probes the two senses of "Le Nocirc;tre," considering both the man himself and the literal meaning of the phrase, to discover where they meet. In this graceful and generous book, they intersect at responsibility; it is this obligation that these poems explore.