The Visible Man: Poems - Softcover

Cole, Henri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374284482 ISBN 13: 9780374284480

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

"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."

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

Praised by Harold Bloom and many other critics and poets for his earlier collections, Henri Cole has grown steadily in poetic stature and importance. "To write what is human, not escapist," is his endeavor. Now 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.
On being awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Henri Cole received the following citation:
"In a poetry nervously alive to the maladies of the contemporary, yet suffused by a rare apprehension of the delights of the senses, Henri Cole has relished the world while being unafraid to satirize it. In poems that are both decorative and plain-spoken he permits his readers to share a keen and unsentimental view of the oddities, horrors, and solaces surrounding them at the end of the twentieth century."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Visible Man

By Henri Cole

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 2005 Henri Cole
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374284480
"Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting"

First Style

To become oneself is so exhausting
that I am as others have made me,
imitating monumental Greek statuary
despite my own feminized way of being.
Like the empire, I was born of pain--
or like a boy, one might say, for I have
become my father, whom I cannot fathom;
the past is a fetish I disdain.
Since they found the bloodless little girl,
with voluptuous lips, buried in me,
I am unsentimental. I do not see
the gold sky at sunset but blackbirds hurled
like lava stones. I am like a severed
finger lost in the wreckage forever.


Second Style

Unable to care for people, I care
mostly for things. At my bitterest,
I see love as self-censorship.
My face is a little Roman theater
in perfect perspective--with colonnades
and landscapes--making illusionistic
reference to feelings I cannot admit.
Painted in Dionysiac yellows and reds,
my unconscious is a rocky grotto
where flies buzz like formalists.
Despite myself, I am not a composite
of signs to be deciphered. In the ghetto--
where Jews, prostitutes and sailors once lived--
I am happiest because I am undisguised.


Third Syle

Tearing away at an old self to make
a new one, I am my most Augustan.
I grieve little. I try to accustom
myself to what is un--Hellenized and chaste.
I let my flat black dado assert
itself without ornament. Can it be, at last,
that I am I--accepting lice clasped
to me like a dirty Colosseum cat?
On a faded panel of Pompeian red,
there's an erotic x-ray of my soul:
a pale boy-girl figure is unconsoled,
pinned from behind at the farthest edge
of human love, where the conscience is not whole,
yet finely engraved like a snail's shell.


Fourth Style

If great rooms declare themselves by the life
lived in them, each night I am reborn
as men and boys stroll among the ruins,
anonymously skirting the floodlights,
sinking into me tenderly, as they do
each other during their brief hungry acts.
"As brief as love," they used to say, Plato
and his kind, exiling man from happiness,
but I am more than a cave whose campfire,
swelling and contracting, is all that is real.
Tomorrow, when I am drunk on sunlight,
I will still feel the furtive glances,
the unchaste kisses and the wet skin
imprinting me until I am born again.



Continues...

Excerpted from The Visible Manby Henri Cole Copyright © 2005 by Henri Cole. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374284482
• ISBN 13: 9780374284480
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80