Middle Earth: Poems [Hardcover]

Henri Cole (Author)

Book Description

Series: Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award | Publication Date: April 1, 2003

The fullest culmination to date of an original voice and “a central poet of his generation” (Harold Bloom)

Time was plunging forward,
like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
following Jenny’s flippers down to see the coral reef,
where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
and it was as if that was all God wanted:
not a wife, a house or a position,
but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.
—from “Olympia”

In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole’s melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man’s creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of “a man alone,” trying “to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence.” Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are “marvels—unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic—burned into being” (Tina Barr, Boston Review).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Making good on his biography's pointed reference to his Japanese birthplace, Cole spent 2001-2 living in Kyoto on a fellowship from the US-Japan Friendship Commission, an experience that tinges this careful book of formal verse with neo-Orientalism. The patterns and tensions of desire and love are figured here as a series of intimate encounters with animals-a koi "defining itself, like a large white/ flower, by separation from me"-and with a feminine other embodied in Japanese cultural reference: "I tied a paper mask onto my face/ my lips almost inside its small red mouth." Cole, whose last book was 1998's acclaimed The Visible Man, follows circuitous mythic paths into barely remembered childhood years spent in Japan, in search of an Ur-moment that will explain or mitigate the death of the poet's father. In poems like "Olympia," "Medusa" and "Self-Portrait as the Red Princess," restrained lines build tightly to unforeseen lyric bursts, in which desire, guilt, and longing bind child and adult, or "open[] the soft meat of our throats." But too often here that feverish, ecstatic moment is deadened by a discursive comment on how to read a poem or why to write one, as in the prefatory remark where self-portrait as body-"almost naked in the heat/ trying to support a little universe/ of blackening pinks"-slides into a glib mission statement: "as a man alone fills a void with words,/ not to be consoling or point to what is good,/ but to say something true that has body,/ because it is proof of his existence." Yet this fifth collection, taking Cole from Knopf to FSG, should reach both established fans and new readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This is a book about loneliness and consolation. Cole now sees a "young gray head in the mirror," and the poems of his fifth collection report the familiar circumstances of midlife. The decrepitude and death of parents predominate in the book's first section, solitary exchanges with himself and the nonhuman world occur in the second, and personal rituals of self-renewal preoccupy the third. Cole is homosexual, and to ignore the fact while perusing the book is to risk missing the special poignancy of "Black Camellia [After Petrarch]," with its admission of using solitary pleasures (gardening, cooking, drinking tea) to "flee from my secret love / and from my mind's worm." As he repeatedly admits, implicitly and forthrightly, however, Cole wants "love / to trample through my arms again," though even when he is engaged in his restorative rituals, as "At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop," he is tempted to merge with the world, "detaching from the human I, Henri." In the collection closer, "Blur," he seems about to encounter love again, but he discovers, "I don't have the time to invest in what / I purport to desire." This poet speaks for a preponderance, perhaps, of his American generation, delicately but with unflinching honesty. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374208816
• ISBN-13: 978-0374208813
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #641,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dishonest and Repetitive, April 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Middle Earth: Poems (Hardcover)

I enjoyed Cole's last book but dislike this one. Though Cole aims for a certain kind of truth, the self-hating in this book becomes a mere self-indulgence in poem after poem. Cole tries to elicit the reader's sympathy under the pretense of writing nakedly; instead, Cole simply has settled into a repetitive style. Cole tries to walk "on an edge," to fuse his metaphors into "one crystalline rock," but his self-indulgent, myopic posturing leaves one cold, "like ice in a champagne bucket."

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Middle Earth, August 31, 2004

By 

L. Manzi "LAM" (Salem, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Middle Earth: Poems (Hardcover)

I thought the poetry in Middle Earth was very fine, the work was direct and straightforward without being plain which I loved. It was not pretentious. It was not redundant. It was often surprisingly humorous (to me at least) and always both insightful and honest.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine book, June 24, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Middle Earth: Poems (Hardcover)

I disagree with the last two reviewers. I think that Henri Cole is at the height of his maturity as a poet. He navigates through the variations of the sonnet with ease; and there are surprises and compressed intricacies in every poem. MIDDLE EARTH is a fine book.