Touch: Poems

By Henri Cole

Henri Cole's last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother's death, a lover's addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole's new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.

Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466877788

Henri Cole

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Book preview

I

Don’t be an open book.

MOTHER

ASLEEP IN JESUS AT REST

(gravestone epitaph)

Their names were Victoria, Ebbenezer, Noah,

Fannie, Travis, Alex, Pleasant,

William Christmas, and Jane.

Like father, they labored in exchange for small wooden houses.

Breaking even was a feat.

Things were settled when the crops were in.

They were my ancestors and lived along the Pee Dee River,

under tupelo, oak, and gum,

where wolves made dens

                                            (You could smell dem wolves!).

According to the Census, they were mulatto

(Spanish mulato, small mule).

Women died of uremic poisoning.

                                                             Children were stillborn.

Those that lived were sprinkled on their foreheads

and went to Sunday school,

taught by Mrs. Lillian Ingram,

in Wolf Pit Township, North Carolina.

One of them wrote a poem:

"There in the boughs, in a tiny nest, are three baby