Green-Wood

Not only is it a timely reissue for this great piece of poetry/cultural biography/essay - fans of Susan Howe, Eliot Weinberger, and even Timothy Morton will need this in their collection. The reissue looks great, and the new introduction by Brian Teare makes it a great package ! ss

Like Cobb's first book, Green-Wood allows us to encounter ideas in relation to a place, bringing not only a quantity of information but a range of intellectual models together in the compressed, ceremonial space of the written page. Her walks through the 19th century Brooklyn cemetery for which the book is named provide a setting, a narrative frame, and a focus to the wide-ranging inquiry that ensues. Is it poem or essay? Neither and both. The pathways she traces among facts and ideas are often a poet's pathways: shortcuts through etymology, long routes through imagery, and, most of all, the sudden encounter we feel with a poet's swerving glance, her changing voice. And yet, to carve those paths, she needs a terrain, the terrain of collage and of essay. The juxtapositions of prose and verse, narration and swerve, make time dual: we are in the cemetery with a reliable narrator, our calm-voiced guide, and we are, simultaneously, in some trans-historical place of hope and ruin, where a voice speaks with authority but without attribution or explanation, to guide us into perception. It is as if a bird had turned and spoken, then, just as quickly, vanished back into the normative text of the next paragraph: "The land on which Pierrepont envisioned Green-Wood..." Quotation as flashback, prose as the surface of normalcy: "A form of enduring, / the ruin or blank / inside the eye." The cultural territory traversed is impressive, as is the repertoire of skills, from lyric poet to documentarian, required to compose such a fluid and gorgeous text.

History, art, journalism and biology reconnoiter in a graveyard. Cobb is the caretaker of this landscape; she performs eulogies and resurrections, makes names appear on unmarked graves, marks a trail for the living to follow. I love this book.