Description
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.
Info
ISBN: 9780374533472
Published Date: January 1, 2011
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Language: English
Page Count: 67
Size: 7.70" l x 4.74" w x 0.37" h
Category
Poetry
Subject
General