The Park
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In The Park, his second book of poetry, John Freeman uses a park as a petri dish, turning a deep gaze on all that pass through it. In language both precise and restrained, Freeman explores the inherent contradictions that arise from a place whose purpose is derived purely from what we bring to it––a park is both natural and constructed, exclusionary and open, unfeeling and burdened with sentimentality. Pulling from both history and his own meditations in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the seasons pass through famous parks, personal parks, parks beneath parks, and other spaces with fabricated outer limits. Throughout, Freeman wonders at how a park, being both curated and public, can be a nexus for a manifestation of great wealth inequality. How have we created these false boundaries for ourselves––with regard to physical space, but also in our minds and societies, in our personal relationships? Freeman plucks out difference in small daily dramas of people and animals only to dissolve it. Interspersed with meditations on love, beauty, and connection, The Park is a pacific and unflinching mirror cast upon a space defined by its transience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The atmospheric second book from Freeman (Maps) is mostly set in and around a Paris park he frequents. The park accepts what enters: animals who "don't need to know/ it's a park" and humans, who inhabit the "park beneath the park," a place in the mind where one can feel alone among others. As in any city, unfathomable wealth brushes up against poverty, despair, and violence; homeless lurk in the shadows, and "almost all statuaries killers." The lover of parks can't forget the sorrow the park is meant to soothe. Returning from a trip to a war zone, the speaker is too disturbed to enter: "I walk its perimeter in a rage, joggers/ and toddlers, lovers, legs entangled." Freeman uses very short lines that can seem over-pruned; contrastingly, the longer lines of what resemble prose poems pack more force: "On the edge of Jardin du Luxembourg nightjars fret/ the dark, shrikes pace the grounds, that fierce khanjar between the eyes." These meditative poems offer a thoughtful exploration on the contradictions and connections formed in public spaces.
