The Look of Things: Poems [Hardcover]

Henri Cole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 1995

The poems in Henri Cole's third book, The Look of Things, voice the tension between the social and the spiritual life, between the desire for company and for solitude, between youth and the ravages of disease, between the American and the exotic.

Cole treats these conflicting concerns in tones sometimes satiric, sometimes elegiac, sometimes ruefully self-deprecating, sometimes harrowingly tragic. The vein of playfulness cannot obscure the social and domestic losses attending life, but joy is not forgotten, even when it is black-bordered by epitaph.

Though the ghost of formal verse haunts these poems, they allude to it without subservience. And Cole lifts the topics of everyday life into the symbolic order of reflection and structure without ever losing his awareness of their origins in the heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Cole's poetry is elegant, urbane, highly polished, and delicately homoerotic. As the book's title suggests, he is fascinated by surfaces, and his considerable descriptive powers wonderfully capture the luxurious atmosphere of southern France and well-appointed New York City apartments. But his interest lies also in the more complex surfaces of human behavior and appearance, where an impeccable gesture or a well-formed body are inadequate disguises for the mortality lurking beneath. Cole's (The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, LJ 12/1/89) technical proficiency gives his poems a limpid, almost mesmerizing cadence, and his sophisticated wit drives the reader's interest from line to line: a memory "clings like lint/on a black velvet sofa" and Manhattan's buildings are "black and white like sonnets." Yet the seamlessness of these poems too often seems precious or mannered, discouraging rather than inviting engagement. Recommended only for comprehensive collections of contemporary poetry.
Christine Stenstrom, Brooklyn P.L., New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Each poem in The Look of Things ripples melancholically out from Cole's pen as if from a stone tossed into a sleeping mind, rousing the drowsy view of things to a pondering of time's effects on the soul. "Sacrament" speaks of loss and the acceptance of loss: "I have given you back to her, / locked the letters in a box." In "Harvard Classics," a child knows through feeling the sadness of his parents' lives: ". . . their marriage is / already dead. I know / this though I'm only six." Cole is a teller of stories that make echoes worth catching and well worth listening to. Ra{£}ul Ni{¤}no

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 71 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 31, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067943352X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679433521
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,188,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intamacy of Observation, April 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Look of Things: Poems (Paperback)

I gravitate towards poems in which the space between the poet and the poem is small. I like to feel the heat of the poet's own breath as I read, hear their voice crescendo at lines that I feel the most. The great strength of Henri Cole's collection "The Look of Things" is his ability to observe things from far distances while simultaneously making the reader intimately feel his presence. It is this balancing act that his skills as a poet are at their sharpest. As quiet as many of these poems are, the poet stays embodied, as though every beautifully sculpted line were an extension of his very self. He can describe a beach he sees from far away, or a café he passes by, yet it is as though he describing these places and disparate events from their core and not from a place outside. The poet frequently melts away into his subjects, yet somehow keeps the boundary between the two clear. I do not quite understand how he does this, but I am trying. It was only on a second reading of many of the poems in this collection that I noticed many of Cole's formal choices. Sometimes, for example, when a poet uses end-rhymes, the form of the poem is always in danger of overshadowing its substance. But it is made clear in poems like "Torso", and "The Roman Baths at Nimes" and the title poem of the collection that Cole is adept at serving a poem with formalistic elements and not merely using them to dress it up. The beauty of these poems is of such an intense immediacy and I encourage those unfamiliar with this poet to experience him for themselves.