Blizzard: Poems

Description

Daring, tender, truthful, the poems in Blizzard, Henri Cole's tenth book, build on a reputation for quiet mastery. Whether he is wrestling with the mundane, history and its disasters, or sexual love, he can sound both classical and contemporary, with the modern austerity of Constantine Cavafy and Elizabeth Bishop. Often exploring the darker places of the heart, his sonnets do not lie down obediently but spark with an honest self-awareness. Cole's lucid, empathetic poems-with lyrical beauty and ethical depth-seem to transmute the anxious perplexities of our time.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published nine previous collections of poetry and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Orphic Paris, a memoir. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

In Blizzard . . . ordinary life shares a plane with the eerie, the uncanny, and the berserk. A menagerie of cats, snails, flies, bees, and other creatures fills these poems, acting simultaneously as heralds bearing news and scavengers feasting on our bodies . . . Blizzard, like many of Cole's recent books, is full of sonnets. He has made the form his own: often they begin loose-limbed and amiable, with an anecdote, then fall through a trapdoor of reminiscence and rue. --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker Over the last 15 years . . . Cole has invented and mastered his own version of the sonnet, a compact lyric utterance that drills down on a single experience, moment, or startled vision, and surprises with every line . . . it's true poetry, the thing we mean by that word. --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR [Blizzard] is a book operating across borders -- those of dignity and civilization versus barbarity and regression, of organization versus chaos. The poems themselves are carefully ordered, and there is something of Lowell's sonnet-phase to them; they often clock in around the 14-line mark, but with a good deal of license taken, and have the quality of a casual cocktail with plenty of beautiful, aphoristic lines clinking like ice in the glass. --Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books Cole has written something minute and sensitive, and yet every bit as thrilling as a more ambitious collection. Blizzard is the perfect small tome for anyone who wants to get back in touch with one's perceptions, and to do so while feeling closer to the mosses and herbs of the earth. --Kiran Bhat, Lambda Literary Cole is on the very short list of poets who long ago should have won the Pulitzer. --William Logan, The New Criterion [A] radiant 10th collection . . . Cole's political commentary is restrained and skillfully orchestrated . . . Readers of this collection will find that Cole's joie de vivre is a balm for the soul. --Publishers Weekly