Or there was no sadness, just a simple fold in time.

Cole Swensen has a new book out and I’m absolutely crazy about it. It’s titled Gravesend, after the town of that name in England. The book is an investigation of that, but also so much more about graves and endings and ghosts and her restless and nimble mind at work.


It’s broken into three sections, “Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?”, “How Did Gravesend Get Its Name?”, and “What Do You Think a Ghost Is?”

Each section has a short prose bit, a few pages long, culled from interviews Swensen conducted with people circling the questions that title each section. The rest of each section is poetry.

It’s one of the things I admire about Swensen’s work, her ability to inhabit a question, and to bring research and her thinking together to chip away at it with the suggestive power of art. It’s the contribution art makes to a subject, full of open spaces.

Anyway, here’s a bit from one of the prose sections, to give you a feel for the tone and voice:

“Ghosts? You’re writing a book on ghosts? This place is full of them. It’s the oldest pub on the river. They say Pocahontas died here. No, I mean here, in this pub, that’s what they say—and why not believe it? No, I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard one. I’ve been down here in the bar, and heard someone walking directly above me when I knew that no one could be up there. And bottles fly off the shelves sometimes, or chairs get up-ended. Everyone who works here has a different story; we all feel them.”

And here’s a poem:


Kent


In the grounds of Bayham Abbey in a garden designed by Repton
a procession of monks just about dusk or just after darkness has fallen
go walking.

Or there was no sadness, just a simple fold in time.

One must be for others a reason to live.

Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold.

Lord Halifax noted it when investigating “the Laughing Man of Wrotham,” who strode into his brother’s room and murdered him night after night

to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and watched him disappear.

There is no cure

for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once

there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death
that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a
death, but that was illusory, too. And all over Kent, someone is still
heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.


Finally, here’s one more poem, that extends the theme a bit. I’m not able to post it here without messing up the form a bit, so I’m including a picture so you can get the feel for how the spaces work.

The Beginnings of the Modern Era


It wasn’t until the ghost story became a genre           that ghosts became strangers

denied as they were      by a Romantic flagrance so      stylized it found itself poised
to the tip of a letter opener           and the man holding it               in his hand

silhouetted      from the back      on a promontory      over a crevasse, which makes
his sister die of music      or the ghost is reduced         to an overpowering smell

of the sea      and only she can hear it:      what we’ve inherited      fletcher of tongues
thin in the wind who blinded by now      a ghost in fingers      is touching them empty

of all its burning      And we claim we never knew them living which gets lost in living
and thus the phaeton stopped to pick him up      and went on to plunge over the cliff

just as it had done in all its lost                         every night for the past fifty years
the ghost ship                  the phantom train                              the cathedral fear

and how right we are      to claim it isn’t ours      though it leaves them stranded
or we abandon      or we, a screw      in a door nailed shut.         It isn’t our fault