Review by Booklist Review
Known for incisive book-length explorations of single subjects hands, in The Book of a Hundred Hands (2005); gardens, in Ours (2008); ghosts, in Gravesend (2012) here, in her sixteenth collection, professor and translator Swensen probes the profound bond between writing and walking. Weaving works of influential authors, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Lisa Robertson's Seven Walks, into luminous meditations, Swensen follows Thoreau through a cathedral of trees: Sand through the iridescent hum of a French riverside; and Woolf through London, lamp-lit at dusk. But Swensen walks alone, too, and she intersperses these singular, paragraph-long musings throughout. Whether she's contemplating cats and the creative process, language and landscapes, or centuries of fleeting yet extraordinary moments, Swensen remains an adept observer and a master of striking forms and line breaks. In The Second Walk, Swensen attests the beautiful is also real, often / accidental, often in the middle of a phrase, a street, a day. And though there's nothing accidental about them, Swensen's phrases, glowing with incandescent imagery and searching wit, are themselves vividly real things of beauty.--Shemroske, Briana Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Utilizing both research and praxis, Swenson (Landscapes from a Train) draws on the rich history of writing about walking in this sonorous and attentive collection. The writers Swenson references span from Chaucer through contemporary poet Lisa Robertson. As a result, the collection moves across wilderness and city streets, by the light of day and the dark of night, over continents and centuries. What walking means for each writer ranges as dramatically as their environments, and the differences therein raise fundamental questions about the dynamics between self, composition, and world. When Robert Walser walks, it is a way to still and arrange: "A walk brings things out, wraps them up// in glorious scents, holds them out at arm's length and keeps them there, just out of reach, perfecting the scene." In contrast, W.G. Sebald writes and walks, "inflaming the line-in the sense that a nerve, sufficiently riled, thwarts any conclusion,// and instead radiates outward in all directions." Early on, Swenson observes that "there's a visceral relationship between the pace at which you walk and that/ at which you write." These poems get into the body, tuning the reader's attention to Swenson's long, steadily percussive lines. Cover to cover, Swenson offers readers a path through "a rhythmed reverie they could all walk into and farther into." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her latest, Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Swensen (Gravesend) turns putting one foot in front of the other into a ruminative collection of prose poems largely filtered through the musings (on the act of walking) of other writers. The ideas of -Wordsworth, Blake, Thoreau, Dickens, Herzog, and Sinclair are explored. The language is crisp and heady-there are no laborers or soldiers slogging through mud here-and strides smartly across the page. In "Breton," for example, "Walking is as the revolution said you tend according to Breton to turn around and gasp though he did not himself but slightly graze admitting that pacing has a different stature entirely." Channeling poet Alice Sebold ("Somewhere Outside Dulwich"), Swensen blurs the line between walking and writing: "by not ending at his periods, but overflowing/ as each sentence follows equally inexorably into the next, page after page ..../ Walking achieves the same thing physically and a walk of several days/ enacts the same excess as does obsessively associative writing." Poems of Swenson's own walks bracket those she invents. The net effect is that of a journal carried and carried on for a long time. -VERDICT Thoughtful readers of poetry should -investigate.-Iris S. Rosenberg, New York © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
