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, with lyrical beauty and ethical depth, seem to transmute the anxious perplexities of our time.
"In Blizzard . . . ordinary life shares a plane with the eerie, the uncanny, and the berserk. A menagerie of cats, snails, flies, bees, and other creatures fills these poems, acting simultaneously as heralds bearing news and scavengers feasting on our bodies . . . Blizzard, like many of Cole's recent books, is full of sonnets. He has made the form his own: often they begin loose-limbed and amiable
Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"Over the last 15 years . . . Cole has invented and mastered his own version of the sonnet, a compact lyric utterance that drills down on a single experience, moment, or startled vision, and surprises with every line . . . it's true poetry, the thing we mean by that word."
