Nothing to Declare
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability
The poems in Henri Cole's ninth book, Nothing to Declare, explore life and need and delight. 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 trim and terse, with a first-place, last-ditch resonance. In their sorrowful richness, they combine a susceptibility to sensuousness and an awareness of desolation. With precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness, Cole transforms the pain of experience into the keen pleasure of expressive language. Nothing to Declare is a rare work, necessary and durable, light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The highly acclaimed Cole (Touch) begins his ninth collection with the perilous honesty that audiences have come to expect and value in his work: "I like invisibleness/ except in the moon s strong,/ broad rays. Some nights/ I ask her paleness, Will I be okay? " As the title suggests, the speaker navigates a subtle struggle to find purpose among the concrete details of life. "It s as if my whole body/ ceased to exist," he writes, "and I experience/ the end of Henri/ in an infinitude of words." Readers bear witness to an elegant loneliness "It s nice to have a lake to love me" and feel the heaviness of life s burdens through the delicacy of Cole s language: "everyday thoughts that are my world/ returned to me, sunlight was white/ with misty distances,/ and I lived." With precise sophistication, Cole perfects a crucial technique of poetry the art of close speculation and does so with intrepid grace. When Cole spends a little too much time navel-gazing, the poems are rescued by bracing, heartrending reminders of mortality: "Probably only/ an examiner/ could distinguish/ a raccoon s bones/ from my own."
