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Title details for Gravity and Center by Henri Cole - Available

Gravity and Center

Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

by Henri Cole
ebook
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2 of 2 copies available

New and selected sonnets from Henri Cole, a poet with "a quality of daring that is rare in our poetry" (Louise Glück).
I take joy in considering my generation. I rewrite
to be read, though I feel shame acknowledging it.
Scattered among imposing trees, the ancient
and the modern intersect, spreading germs of pain
and happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink.
Gravity and Center collects almost thirty years of deeply original work by one of America's greatest living poets. As his writing has grown and changed, Henri Cole has conceived and articulated an approach of his own to one of poetry's most enduring and challenging forms: the sonnet. Cole writes in his afterword, "I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn't mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some reason the lean, muscular body of the sonnet frees me to be simultaneously dignified and bold, to appear somewhat socialized though what I have to say may be eccentric or unethical, and, most important of all, to have aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world."
Cole is both confessional and abstract, intimate and cosmopolitan, astringent and slain by beauty. Whether he is writing about the contingencies of selfhood, the lives of animals and plants, or the violent events of the world, there is always the incandescence of his language and the power and surprise of unique formal mastery.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 4, 2023

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780374606695

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780374606695
      • File size: 1412 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 20, 2023
      Suffering is neutralized by love for nature and a Zen mindset (“the sound of water poured into a bowl”) in the unflinching 12th collection by Cole (Blizzard). These new and previously collected sonnets are not love poems, though some are sex poems: “My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain.” The title poem speaks from the damaged center: “I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me.” Dysfunctional family relationships are at the root of the speaker’s sense of alienation and disgust, viscerally introduced in the preface: “I came from a place with a hole in it, my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.” “Chiffon Morning,” reminiscent of James Merrill’s “The Broken Home,” expands on the mother-son relationship: “sour-milk/ breaths rehearsing death, she faces me, her room/ a pill museum where orange tea bags/ draining on napkins almost pass for art.” About the speaker’s father, he remembers: “My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,/ watching a portable black-and-white television,/ reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,/ which he preferred to Modern Fiction.” There’s no easy resolution in this showcase of Cole’s subtle and evocative rendering of the human experience.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from March 1, 2023
      Collected from across Cole's acclaimed oeuvre, these sonnets embody all the best qualities of this poet's enviable economy of language, evocative imagery, wicked turns of phrase, and sheer lyrical genius. One can turn easily to any page and land on a gem. Some play with rhyme placement and flirt with forbidden desire (""a handsome / priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back, / not desiring to go it alone""), and others astonish with gentle simplicity (""I sit on a rock, / tearing up bread for red and white carp / pushing out of their element into mine""). ""Self-Portrait with Addict"" is direct and devastating, ""There's no animal / that sleep-deprives itself like the human."" ""Quilt"" stitches together alcoholic gay lovers, family shame, and intense psychodrama, ""a lively recycling of materials seen often in the South."" That Cole manages to range the wide spectrum of human experience within the 14 lines of the sonnet is testament both to the poet's craft and the form itself. Sonnet lovers would be wise also to check out Wanda Coleman's Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets (2022) and Laurie Ann Guerrero's A Crown for Gumecindo 2015).

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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