Customer Reviews

Middle Earth: Poems

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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."

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.

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.

Henri Cole, one of America's most avowedly homosexual poets, voices this, his fifth volume, with personae diverse enough to populate a small town, or at least a home where a young man's parents are made culpable for the sins of the child. His ambiguities of gender serve to enrich and sharpen the volume, rather than making it seem a bit out of focus. In one poem he observes: "This is a poem. / Is this a table? No, this is a poem. Am I a girl?" He has asked this before, and he would so much like to know. But I suspect there is no answer, and if he could find one, somehow objectively, would he accept it? Of course, this conundrum is precisley the engine that makes his smoke so deliciously "confessional," as M.L. Rosenthal first used the term, in reference to Lowell's Life Studies, in 1967. Cole wants the reader to know that his "secret" - no secret at all - incriminates him, yet he embraces the role of subversive with both power and humility. Middle Earth is the land where his parents still rule, from another realm, like disappointed despots. He accepts whatever blame he suspects should be pointed his way, but knows that these seeds have been long germinating.
This is poetry in its rawest form, a poet quaking with expiation.

Henri Cole, Middle Earth (FSG, 2003)

First off, let's get this out of the way: this book has no ties whatever to Tolkein.

That said, it was the first proof I've ever had of an urban legend I've been hunting down for years. Skim through the Poet's Market sometims and look at the descriptions of the things magazine editors don't want. Most of them come down to one basic description said in a thousand ways: "pointless academic tripe." A few have, in the past, named names, but the names most often named I never thought of as all that pointless, some of them downright enjoyable. (But then, I'm an imagist, and from my POV the image is its own point in any decent poem.) Most of the "tell, don't show" poems, which are the very definition of pointless, don't fit the academic part of the puzzle.

Then I discovered the work of Henri Cole, and for the first time, I understood what all those editors are on about.

Archibald MacLeish once wrote that "a poem should not mean, but be." Cole, on the other hand, wants desperately to invest every word with meaning (instead of letting the words invest themselves with meaning, as any good poem does), and while in some existentialist sense they do achieve being, there is no life behind them.

The main problem here is that it seems Henri Cole has never met an image he liked. He's too busy floundering around in the world of vagueness to give the reader anything to latch onto, resulting in tortured lines like "Heart, unquiet thing/I don't want to hate any more. I want love/to trample through my arms again." ("My Tea Ceremony") It's not like we haven't read the same thing from a hundred thousand high-school-age teen-angst poets. Or the painful thud of perhaps the collection's worst line, "Tears represent how much my mother loves me" ("Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono"). It would barely fly in a James Joyce novel; there is nothing at all poetic about it. * ½

Most of the poems of Middle Earth are a modest collection (about 50 pages worth) of highly concentrated lines of 14. This was my first time to read Cole, and I am now about to buy his other books of poetry. Cole reminds me of the efficiency of words used by an Ammons or Bishop giving up the casual chattiness of an Ashbery, but still allowing the reader to read as if the words were there own. Every word of an Henri Cole poem seems to lean and depend on the next one; they are a most tightly construction. Most of these poems begin with a more-than-keen observation and then quickly develop into a sort of liquid philosophy that is purposefully unstable all the while looking in a mirror for flaws. I do very much agree with Bloom: Cole has one of the strongest voices in poetry and his substance and slant on things will make you a different person than before the encounter of Cole. In my judgment, what will make Henri Cole a strong poet is if he can continue to dominate the shorter sprint poems and later master the long-distance poems that Ashbery, Ammons, etc. have come to be affluent at.

MIDDLE EARTH as a title is seductive, though not nearly so seductive as the always-near-the-point-of-revelation that these sensually beautiful poems deliver. Henri Cole explores middle age, reflecting on his parents, his memories of childhood, and examines his responses to the return to the Japan of his youth, muses on longing, desire, beauty, and fear. These poems are all personal, memoiresque musings and in the hands of less secure poets such revelations can seem more self serving than sharing. But in Coles' rolling lines we come to understand or at least explore our own fears and delights as well as entering his middle earth of life. This is a lovely and elegant collections of ethereal poems by a man who understands his craft. And your intuition will lead you to the subterranean truths gently cloaked in his Middle Earth.