Henri Cole

“A Meteor of Intelligent Substance” “Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is” “Liberties sure is needed in these times.” In a short time since its launch, Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics, a quarterly, has become essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. The writers in Liberties offer deep experience from across borders, national identities, political affiliations and artistic achievements. As the introductory essay in the inaugural edition noted, “At this journal we are betting on what used to be called the common reader, who would rather reflect than belong and asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies.” Each issue of Liberties features original in-depth essays and compelling new poetry from some of the world's most significant writers, artists, and scholars, as well as introducing new talent, to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. This spring issue of Liberties includes: Giles Kepel on the Murder of Samuel Paty; Ingrid Rowland’s Long Live the Classics!; Vladimir Kara-Murza Surviving Putin’s Poisons; Paul Starr on Reckoning with National Failure from Covid; Becca Rothfeld on Today's Sanctimony Literature; Enrique Krauze explores What is Latin America?; William Deresiewicz on Why Great Visual Art Forces Us to Think; Benjamin Moser on Rediscovering Frans Hals; David Nirenberg on What We Can Learn from Earlier Plagues; Agnes Callard’s view of Romance without Love, Love without Romance; Mitchell Abidor looks back to “Social Media” in 1895 to Understand a Crowd’s “Wisdom”; The Tallis Scholars' Peter Phillips on the Secrets of Josquin; David Thomson on Movies’ Poetic Desire; Poetry from Henri Cole, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Paul Muldoon; and, Leon Wieseltier (editor) asks "Where Are the Americans?” and Celeste Marcus (managing editor) writes for a Pluralistic Heart.

Henri Cole pins the complexities of aging and the mystery of the passage of time to the page. The Other Love is most of all a reflection on aging and the passing of time. It is here that the struggle between form and chaos is most poignantly palpable in Henri Cole's ravishing new book. The Other Love is also a way of seeing the world, an attitude more than an emotion, a love of things and people as they are, and of being open to the beauty and mysteries of the world, despite a constant awareness of violence, particularly an American violence. As the Nobel laureate Louise Gl ck wrote, "Here indeed is a triumphant achievement from a consummate artist."

New and selected sonnets from Henri Cole, a poet with "a quality of daring that is rare in our poetry" (Louise Gl ck). I take joy in considering my generation. I rewriteto be read, though I feel shame acknowledging it. Scattered among imposing trees, the ancientand the modern intersect, spreading germs of painand happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink. Gravity and Center collects almost thirty years of deeply original work by one of America's greatest living poets. As his writing has grown and changed, Henri Cole has conceived and articulated an approach of his own to one of poetry's most enduring and challenging forms: the sonnet. Cole writes in his afterword, "I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn't mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some reason the lean, muscular body of the sonnet frees me to be simultaneously dignified and bold, to appear somewhat socialized though what I have to say may be eccentric or unethical, and, most important of all, to have aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world." Cole is both confessional and abstract, intimate and cosmopolitan, astringent and slain by beauty. Whether he is writing about the contingencies of selfhood, the lives of animals and plants, or the violent events of the world, there is always the incandescence of his language and the power and surprise of unique formal mastery.

Henri Cole, one of our greatest poets, explores the discordant nature of our condition on earth in Blizzard, his tenth collection." An artist of the greatest gifts." --Louise Gl ck Daring, tender, truthful, the poems in Blizzard, Henri Cole's tenth book, build on a reputation for quiet mastery. Whether he is wrestling with the mundane, history and its disasters, or sexual love, he can sound both classical and contemporary, with the modern austerity of Cavafy and Bishop. Often exploring the darker places of the heart, his sonnets do not lie down obediently, but spark with an honest self-awareness. Cole's lucid, empathetic poems--with lyrical beauty and ethical depth--seem to transmute the anxious perplexities of our time.

A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole. Henri Cole's Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, "For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew." Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus--mystic, oracular, entrancing--Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerabilityHenri Cole's bold new collection, Nothing to Declare, contains poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. After his last three books--Touch, Blackbird and Wolf, and Middle Earth--in which the sonnet was a thrown shape and not merely a template, Cole's buoyant new poems seem trim and terse, with a forthright, clear-eyed moral gaze. In their sorrowful richness, they combine a susceptibility to sensuousness and an awareness of desolation. Cole transforms the pain of experience into the keen pleasure of expressive language, with his precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness. Nothing to Declare is a rare work that is light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.

"Solarium is a completely original gem of a book."—Henri Cole, from the forewordBowl of the lake. Bowl of the sky. Bowl of the lake with the sky in it. You looked at you in the water. The blizzard is cold. And the boy in the blizzard is blue. Jordan Zandi grew up in the rural Midwest, and in 2011 graduated with an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he was the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship to Bolivia. His poetry has appeared in the New Republic and Little Star.

A GENEROUS SELECTION FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST LIVING POETS Henri Cole has been described as a "fiercely somber, yet exuberant poet" by Harold Bloom, who identifies him as the central poet of his generation. Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career. Pierce the Skin brings together sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years, including work from Cole's early, closely observed, virtuosic books, long out of print, as well as his important more recent books, The Visible Man (1998), Middle Earth (2003), and Blackbird and Wolf (2007). The result is a collection reconsecrating Cole's central themes: the desire for connection, the contingencies of selfhood and human love, the dissolution of the body, the sublime renewal found in nature, and the distance of language from experience. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," Cole says, striving in Pierce the Skin to break the barrier even between word and skin. Maureen N. McLane wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Cole is a poet of "self-overcoming, lusting, loathing and beautiful force." This book will have a permanent place with other essential poems of our moment.

"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."

"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 and Hart Crane is beautifully extended in "The Visible Man," particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in "The Visible Man.""

"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").