"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 Crane is beautifully extended in The Visible Man, particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are...

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 poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man's creaturely...

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...

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 fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career....

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...

A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A "spooky" collection in the words of Robert Lowell-"a maddening work of genius."
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered "a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax." Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk,...

A bold collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability

Henri Cole's bold collection, Nothing to Declare, contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. 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 the sonnet was a thrown shape and not merely a template, Cole's buoyant new poems seem...

Henri Cole's Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and prose poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family; poetry and solitude; the self and freedom.

Cole writes of Paris, "For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of...