Bücher von Henri Cole

"Eine strahlende Gedichtsammlung. Henri Coles Lebensfreude ist Balsam für die Seele." Publishers Weekly"Poesie von seltener Kühnheit" urteilte Louise Glück über den Franko-Amerikaner Henri Cole, der eine zentrale Stimme der amerikanischen Dichtung ist. Seine Verse, geschult an Kavafis und Bishop, sind gezeichnet von der heiteren Verzweiflung eines Zeitgenossen, der sich fragt, was das Wesen des Menschen noch ausmacht: ob er registriert, wie sich die Wochen recyceln, wie sich das Chaos von allein durchsortiert, oder ob er ein Foto entdeckt, auf dem Flüchtlinge das Fleisch eines toten Pferds verzehren. Coles Sprache glüht dunkel, seine Gedichte sind eine Offenbarung.

I don't want words to sever me from reality.I don't want to need them. I want nothingto 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 the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Central here is the human need for love, the highest function of our species. Whether writing about solitude or unsanctioned desire, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract, and he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

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 self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of "a man alone," trying --to say something true that has body, because it is proof of his existence.. . Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are . . .marvels-unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic-burned into being-- (Tina Barr, Boston Review).

"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 presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man."