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 verse, Henri Cole deepens his excavations and examinations of autobiography and memory. These poems—often hovering within the realm of the sonnet—combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Central here is the human need for love, the highest function of our species. Whether writing about solitude or unsanctioned desire, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract, and he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published over half a dozen previous collections of poetry, including Touch, Nothing to Declare, and Blackbird and Wolf; and a memoir, Orphic Paris. Among his many awards are the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Boston, where he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Categories

• Poetry / American

Product Details

ISBN: 9780374531126
ISBN-10: 0374531129
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: March 18th, 2008
Pages: 80
Language: English

“[Cole writes] in a voice that buzzes with emotion . . . His best book to date.” —Publishers Weekly