Blackbird and Wolf: Poems

By Henri Cole

Book Overview

I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling--as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.

--from "Gravity and Center"

In his sixth collection of verse, Henri Cole deepens his excavations and examinations of autobiography and memory. These poems--often hovering within the realm of the sonnet--combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Central here is the human need for love, the highest function of our species. Whether writing about solitude or unsanctioned desire, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract, and he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374531129
• ISBN13: 9780374531126
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Sad, funny, tender...........cause for celebration!

Any new book by Henri Cole is cause for celebration, and no one who cares about contemporary American poetry would want to miss this one. Reading it, I understood why Harold Bloom put him with Anne Carson and called him a "leading poet of his generation." The precision and beauty of the language are matched by the acute and compassionate eye the poet turns on human relationships and desires. Nothing showy or wasteful ever in these poems; always the sad, funny, tender, devastating truth. I've read it twice already.