Henri Cole
Author
Publication Date
2020
Language
English
Description
Daring, tender, truthful, the poems in Blizzard, Henri Cole's tenth book, build on a reputation for quiet mastery. Whether he is wrestling with the mundane, history and its disasters, or sexual love, he can sound both classical and contemporary, with the modern austerity of Cavafy and Bishop. Often exploring the darker places of the heart, his sonnets do not lie down obediently, but spark with an honest self-awareness.
Cole's lucid, empathetic poems,...
Author
Publication Date
2014
Language
English
Description
Time was plunging forward,
like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef,
where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
and it was as if that was all God wanted:
not a wife, a house or a position,
but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.-from "Olympia"
In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole's melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few...
Author
Publication Date
2015
Language
English
Description
A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability
The poems in Henri Cole's ninth book, Nothing to Declare, explore life and need and delight. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. After his last three books-Touch, Blackbird and Wolf, and Middle Earth-in which...
Author
Publication Date
2014
Language
English
Description
"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics-poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life-that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, "persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart...
Author
Publication Date
2014
Language
English
Description
I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling-as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.
-from "Gravity and Center"
In his sixth collection of poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems-often hovering within the...
Author
Publication Date
2014
Language
English
Description
A GENEROUS SELECTION FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST LIVING POETS
Henri Cole has been described as a "fiercely somber, yet exuberant poet" by Harold Bloom, who identifies him as the central poet of his generation. Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's...