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.Author: Henri Cole
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 09/04/2012
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.24lbs
Size: 8.31h x 5.55w x 0.34d
ISBN: 9780374533472
Language: English
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