Blackbird and Wolf: Poems
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Book Overview
"I don't want words to sever me from reality.""I don't want to need them. I want nothing""to 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 poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems--often hovering within the realm of the sonnet--combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in "Blackbird and Wolf," he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0374113793
ISBN13:9780374113797
Release Date:March 2007
Publisher:Farrar Straus Giroux
Length:59 Pages
Weight:0.55 lbs.
Dimensions:0.5" x 5.8" x 8.5"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Sad, funny, tender...........cause for celebration!
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
Any new book by Henri Cole is cause for celebration, and no one who cares about contemporary American poetry would want to miss this one. Reading it, I understood why Harold Bloom put him with Anne Carson and called him a "leading poet of his generation." The precision and beauty of the language are matched by the acute and compassionate eye the poet turns on human relationships and desires. Nothing showy or wasteful ever in these poems; always the sad, funny, tender, devastating truth. I've read it twice already.
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