The Park

By John Freeman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781619322226

John Freeman

John Freeman is a highly experienced professional photographer and the author of several books on photography, including Collins Digital SLR Handbook and Need to Know? Digital SLR Photography. John has a regular column in What Digital Camera? and Digital Camera magazines, and his work can be viewed at his frequent exhibitions and on his website.

Book preview

I

Modern Gods

Backlit by the glow

from a small passageway,

he kneels into the fog

of yellow light,

head kissing the carpet.

I step around him,

respecting his privacy, when

the mat becomes not prayer

rug but builder’s tool,

a black piece of tarmac laid down

before the bank so he could

peer close, fix the dead

motion sensor so that people

with money could

be seen, all doors opening

for them.

Unfinished

She never saw it completed,

did not glimpse the many

varieties of tortoises

that lounged in a pond

near the north gate, never

peered into its vast fish pool,

never lowered her voice upon

stepping into the medal

room, her son’s decoration

shimmering in its ambition.

She, being a woman, had to

move in while the making was

still being made, 1625,

interiors sawdust and silk. Mornings padding

across cold marble floors past footmen

clicking heels together, the arc

of her life there for all to see

in twenty-four Rubenses—girlhood,

motherhood, widowhood.

How they resented her,

the French, but needed her

money. She would have to

commission her own story. She

just needed more time, but time

knows when it is being chased.

The cardinals and ministers did not

even hide the whetstone.

They would eat

her. Sailing to the Spanish

Netherlands, banished

to Belgium, did she know

she’d never see her beloved park again? Or did

it occur to her, finally, she could never

replace time with time? Even a third

of a century building was not enough

to return her childhood

for a moment. So she gave

the park to her son, the second

son, in the full throes

of his dukedom, an expert in

acquisition. He’d never

understand the only things

that matter are irreplaceable. Then the palace began

to tumble through the ages,

each exchange erasing what

it was meant to replace, developers

nibbling at its margins, Napoleon

ripping up her fountain, urban

planners stuffing its