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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 innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.
Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.
Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.
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Reviews
"In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores . . . As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally . . . After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech . . . No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole's spare, masterfully controlled
James Cihlar, Coldfront
"Cole's eighth book of poems may be his most sensitive (in the manner of a compass needle), pointing as precisely as possible to the various sources of a lifetime's fragility and emotional power. Written mostly in the pseudo-sonnets he's developed in his recent books, these poems take long, at times excruciating looks at memories that Cole's speakers must force themselves to learn from . . . It's
Publisher's Weekly