Synopses & Reviews
"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."
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, and was raised in Virginia. The recipient of many awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Middle Earth, he is the author of six other books of poetry. Now back in print, this collection "is a breakthrough book in Cole's ongoing body of work . . . [It] is a triumph not only for the art but for the scathingly told tale of honest and unflinching realism" (Laim Rector, The Harvard Review). Cole, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Middle Earth, folds autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyricspoems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life. "These poems are marvelsunbuttoned, riveting, dramaticburned into being."Tina Barr, Boston Review "The Visible Man, Henri Cole's fourth book, is a breakthrough book in Cole's ongoing body of work . . . [It] is a triumph not only for the art but for the scathingly told tale of honest and unflinching realism itself. . . The Visible Man is very much an uprising."Liam Rector, The Harvard Review "These poems are marvelsunbuttoned, riveting, dramaticburned into being."Tina Barr, Boston Review
"The invention of a self so harrowing in character will remind readers of the confessions in Robert Lowell's Life Studies . . . Most other books would be reduced to ashes by the comparison."William Logan, The Washington Post Book World
"The Visible Man, Henri Cole's fourth book, is a breakthrough book in Cole's ongoing body of work . . . [It] is a triumph not only for the art but for the scathingly told tale of honest and unflinching realism itself. . . The Visible Man is very much an uprising."Liam Rector, The Harvard Review
Review
"The invention of a self so harrowing in character will remind readers of the confessions in Robert Lowell's
Life Studies . . . Most other books would be reduced to ashes by the comparison." --William Logan,
The Washington Post Book World* "In his fourth collection, Henri Cole has submitted to the unsparing self-examination and self-generated demand for change that mark the true artist . . . The voice that breaks the poems open frees itself in a crucible of confession and absolution, through poems that incorporate history, art, religion, family, and sexuality."--Tina Barr, The Boston Review
Synopsis
"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."
Synopsis
Praised by Harold Bloom and many other critics and poets for his earlier collections, Henri Cole has grown steadily in poetic stature and importance. "To write what is human, not escapist," is his endeavor. Now 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.
On being awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Henri Cole received the following citation:
"In a poetry nervously alive to the maladies of the contemporary, yet suffused by a rare apprehension of the delights of the senses, Henri Cole has relished the world while being unafraid to satirize it. In poems that are both decorative and plain-spoken he permits his readers to share a keen and unsentimental view of the oddities, horrors, and solaces surrounding them at the end of the twentieth century."
About the Author
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, and was raised in Virginia. The recipient of many awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Award for his most recent book,
Middle Earth, he is the author of four other books of poems.