Bøger af 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.

A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerabilityHenri Cole's bold new collection, Nothing to Declare, contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. 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 forthright, clear-eyed moral gaze. In their sorrowful richness, they combine a susceptibility to sensuousness and an awareness of desolation. Cole transforms the pain of experience into the keen pleasure of expressive language, with his precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness. Nothing to Declare is a rare work that is light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.

A GENEROUS SELECTION FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST LIVING POETS Henri Cole has been described as a "fiercely somber, yet exuberant poet" by Harold Bloom, who identifies him as the central poet of his generation. Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career. Pierce the Skin brings together sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years, including work from Cole's early, closely observed, virtuosic books, long out of print, as well as his important more recent books, The Visible Man (1998), Middle Earth (2003), and Blackbird and Wolf (2007). The result is a collection reconsecrating Cole's central themes: the desire for connection, the contingencies of selfhood and human love, the dissolution of the body, the sublime renewal found in nature, and the distance of language from experience. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," Cole says, striving in Pierce the Skin to break the barrier even between word and skin. Maureen N. McLane wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Cole is a poet of "self-overcoming, lusting, loathing and beautiful force." This book will have a permanent place with other essential poems of our moment.

A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole.Henri Cole's Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, "For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew." Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus-mystic, oracular, entrancing-Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

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."