The Visible Man: Poems

by Henri Cole

Book Overview

"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, "persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374284482
• ISBN13: 9780374284480
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Intense

So many "gay" poets write tired, boring, clichéd poems about gay experience. What a surprise to find a poet who can tackle gay issues without dumbing down the poems. Some wrenching, harsh, stunning poems here. Every reader, gay or straight, have experienced some of the emotions that guide the speaker of these poems. Unlike the majority of contemporary poetry, these poems have something to say and actually "says" it well. No boring academic tricks to wade through. After reading it, I can see why there is so much buzz about this book.

Incredible

I can't remember the last time I read a book of poetry this powerful. At times reminiscent of Robert Lowell, Cole's candor and intensity of language is amazing. These poems are strangely mean, self-deprecating, troubling. At a time when so much poetry is blather, what a surprise to find these.

Best Book of Poetry published in 1998

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.

A brilliant, elegant new work by a major contemporary voice.

From a review in Publisher's Weekly (9/28/98): A dazzling combination of ceremonious poise and brash, confessional utterances, the lyrics of Cole's fourth book form an intensely personal quest to reconcile tradition with angst-ridden bodily desire. Cole sets the book's first section in a glitzy contemporary Italy where "men and boys stroll among the ruins,/ anonymously skirting the floodlights." In a sly break away from the ghosts of Merrill and Bishop (haunting this and earlier collections), foreboding is enhanced by masterful mock simplicity: "Curleyhead was bellowing Puccini/ and making the boat rock./ The sun shone like a Majolica clock./ The sea boiled noisily./ I lay down like a child in a box./ It was my birthday." Familiar Catholic rituals prompt disturbing questions. Poems like "White Spine" stage frank inner confrontations between religion and sexuality: "Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,/ how can He love me and hate what I am?" But Cole's greatest strength is in his consistent attention to the body, both in theologizing poems like "26 Hands," "Giallo Antico" and "Adam Dying" and in classically tinged images reminiscent of his contemporaries Carl Phillips and Karl Kirchwey. The twelfth of the 14 sonnet sequence "Apollo" ends: "as in the seventh circle/ the burning rain prevents the sodomites/ from standing still/ But I am in motion, stroking toward what I cannot see, like an oar/ dipped in the blood that ravishes it,/ until blood-sprays rouse the dissolute mind,/ the ineffable tongue arouses itself." Such lines are exemplary of Cole's graven images and wrenching, impressive effects.