Goest     by Cole Swensen     Alice James Books     $13.95 A review by John Poch A book of poems with a title like Goest might make one expect the contents therein to carry forward some sort of authoritative verbal imagination or even compelling verbal action. Neither is the case in Cole Swensen's ninth book of poems. Swensen is enamored of the passive construction (especially paired with "there"). "There's", "there is" "there are," etc. clot the mostly spare poems with unnecessarily lax verbiage enough to be bothersome. There's something to be said about passive constructions lightening or slowing down labored language in just the right way to capture our full attention, but the repetition of so simple an effect can dull the senses. Swensen uses the construction to point out various surprising facts about our world: "There's a set of identical twins who communicate through prime numbers" or "Once there was a man / who wrote a symphony based entirely / on the arrangement of birds on the power lines outside" Strange, but true! Swensen is smart enough not to build a poem on the foundation of one of these "ideas" (she prefers a pastiche of facts and impressions), but she relies on the white space of the page far too much. One can almost hear the cries of those rushing to defend the poems: "Yes, but they're about whiteness." Indeed, they are, but so was George Michael and much else wrong with the 80's. Silences. Absences. The re-discovery of John Cage! The white things (a t-shirt, an egret, a sail, etc.) within the poems mean so much more than all the white silence around them, and one feels they are never given their due. One feels, instead, a sort of sluggishness on the part of the author to mine the possibilities of each poem, to give a background against which the white can make its presence/absence known. Sometimes, however, the syntax and sound are lovely, tight, and well-deserving of breathing room. In "The Future of Sculpture," a meditation on Cy Twombly, Swensen does a compelling job of translating Twombly's visual art (Twombly's a terrible poet, though he can make phrases on the canvas look elegant) into words:             His hands of sufficient cause   and of all he touched, it is said             the Red Sea is white, and the Dead Sea, dead. Is a thread   seen end on-kingdom, phylum, class, and duress   is of the vast.                   And then a chariot runs through it. Car nymphea caerulea    Toys are ancient children. Except for the passive voice, Hart Crane might swoon. The rhythms here, are gorgeous. And then, in the central section of the book based on John Beckmann's A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins (1846) we see the exact force of words in "The First Lightbulb":      precise erase      a gate again      where the sky died      in a coin That's the whole poem. A poem with this kind of razor edge earns the white space invested into and around it. One has the sense that this haiku-like arrangement has been labored over, sharpened, honed, and polished. In another poem's most beautiful moment, we hear, "I keep the rest / in a box above the door to guard the dark." But it seems Swensen is wary of such regular rhythm and wholeness, preferring fragmentation to make her point. Where most of the poems might have achieved the kind of grace and grandeur of Twombly, they are much more in the style of Joseph Cornell. They are little boxes of found objects: images, inventions (amazing facts!), shapes, minerals and baubles that, by their very arrangement and juxtaposition, have the power to create psychic associations. I'd say the plainness of the old wood used in Cornell's boxes is akin to the plainness of Swensen's verbiage. It could be claimed that Goest is a homonym for "ghost." But rather than be haunted by these poems, I only notice that the book shows glimpses of what might have been. Each poem shows a flash of brilliance, something moving in the shadows, but I found myself missing it, almost constantly, asking for more, and sometimes, even less. John Poch has recent and forthcoming work in Colorado Review, Yale Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Paris Review. He was a recipient of the 1998 Discovery/The Nation prize and the 2000 Colgate Creative Writing Fellowship. He teaches in the writing program at Texas Tech University.			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