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Rating:  - 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.
Rating: - 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.
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