Touch
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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, as in "Dead Mother," in which "five or six tears profound,/ unflinching, humane ran out of her skull,/ breathtakingly heroic." With the same power of attention, Cole also watches the self slowly passing away: "My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping./ It sauntered along the avenue asking, Why/ should I commit myself to him?.../... Then my good stiff prick went, too." It's as if Cole's extreme attention manages, somehow, to simultaneously magnify and sooth aloneness, a mystery like the one into which a pair of free canaries fly in the book's title poem: "Though they didn't know where they were going,/ they made their prettiest song of all."
