5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Writing What Is Human", July 27, 2001
[This book brief appeared March 11, 1999, in Seattle's "The Stranger" and can be found online at http://www.thestranger.com/1999-03-11/books2.html]
Cole does to the sonnet what postmodern consciousness does to the self--he wrenches it, shatters it, sucks it dry, turns it inside out, and sometimes, for a moment, holds it in a quiet embrace. The central problem of his book is knowledge, which made Apollo a god but divides us from ourselves. Cole seeks to unite body and mind in a self through Arte Povera poems - rough, impromptu works "in motion, / stroking toward what [he] cannot see" ('Apollo'). But the self proves to be neither a temple for the spirit nor a sturdy Greek column, and Cole becomes a tourist and connoisseur of his own disintegration -- he is marble rubble, broken stanzas, stray glimpses of porn flicks, bouts of loveless fellatio under the pier. The poet is a Visible Man in what he calls an "erotic x-ray of my soul" ('Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting').
Though Cole refuses to flatter us with sweetness, he can be very funny, mingling exquisitely precise imagery with comic observation. Ancient crumbling statues resemble "bodies sinking in quicksand," but "a luckless prick / is frozen in the stucco." Scholars "eat big bowls of pasta / and drain their preposterous bowels" ('The Scholars'). Many passages are marvelous - history has "white teeth / jammed with gristle" ('The Black Jacket'); forgiveness is "so hard to swallow it unshackles us" ('26 Hands'); a house is "illuminated all night, / like the unconscious, though no one enters" ('The Coastguard Station').
Cole is determined "To write what is human, not escapist." He makes himself "at home with evil, with unexamined feelings, / with just the facts" ('Apollo'), and welcomes the "Stranger, with genitalia greased," crooning, "Come, unlace my boots; I chose you" ('Etna'). Here the nervous system is, for better or worse, the organ of the mind.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Book of Poetry published in 1998, January 11, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Visible Man: Poems (Hardcover)
Henri Cole has long been seen as a fussy apprentice to James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop, but this has always been an issue easily overlooked because of the vigor with which Cole has often written about his subjects. With this, his fourth book, Cole has not rejected the fastidiousness of Bishop or the sly elegance of Merrill, he has corrupted these things and, by so doing, created a harrowing, desperate, powerful poetry. In many of these poems, the complications may seem less than subtle until one realizes the focus of angst is only one of the many complications in each poem. Christianity, its pagan predecessors, modern Law, Homosexuality and its place in these constructs--all of these issues are present but secondary to the voice of speaker whose anguish to understand is the anguish of self-blame and self-deception. A brilliant and haunting book of poems.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A "must-read" poetry collection, March 26, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Visible Man: Poems (Hardcover)
I bought this book of poems after hearing a few friends talk about it and then reading all the good customer reviews here at Amazon. I have to say it really is an amazing book, and it really is one of the best books of poetry I have read in years. The poems are so sharp and so well-written and so harsh. He is our contemporary Robert Lowell. Anyone who likes poetry should take a look at this book.
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