Henri Cole
Author
Formats
Description
"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." --back cover
Author
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...
3) Touch: Poems
Author
Description
Henri Cole's last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics-a mother's death, a lover's addiction, war-with a startling clarity. Cole's new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body-both its pleasures and its discontents-and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between...
Author
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
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
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
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
Description
"As his writing has grown and changed, Henri Cole has conceived and articulated an approach of his own to one of poetry’s most enduring and challenging forms: the sonnet. Cole writes in his afterword, 'I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn’t mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some reason the lean,...