Blackbird and Wolf
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems—often hovering within the realm of the sonnet—combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in Blackbird and Wolf, he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his sixth book, Cole wants to write "something highly controlled/ that is the opposite," and he succeeds. Once a poet of great formal control and dense, sometimes inscrutable lines, Cole (Middle Earth) now writes simply and sparely, mixing autobiography, eros and the natural world in a voice that buzzes with emotion. Single-lined stanzas accentuate the poems' spareness, placing great pressure on each line. Cole can devastate ("I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say/ you love me,"), declaim in deadpan ("I have a fever which I'm treating with gin") or plainly declare ("I'm tired of just being a man"). Many poems look grief in the face, addressing a dying mother, an ex-lover, flowers and animals, an absent god, the disappointing self, even the 43rd president, with whom Cole admits to a degree of fellowship a rare sentiment these days, especially in poems a common fear of "some unbroken animal/ circling in the dark wood." There are a very few moments when the feeling drains, but mostly this intimate, honest voice surprises. Poetry "is stronger/ than I am and makes me do what it wants," Cole writes of the bullying that has produced his best book to date.
