Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007
By Henri Cole
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About this ebook
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.
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.
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Book preview
Pierce the Skin - Henri Cole
The Marble Queen
1986
V-winged and Hoary
All our pink and gold and blue
birds have gone to Panama or Peru:
the willow flycatcher with its sneezy fitzbew,
the ruby-throated hummingbird with jewel-
like gorgets and the blue-rumped finch,
its song a warble with a guttural chink.
Far, far across the ghostly frozen lake,
above the great drifts of snow swaying
like dunes, the frosty Iceland gulls,
pallid as beach fleas, make great loops and catfall
into the wind. They are all that is left.
Throngs of children tiptoe deftly
across the lake to watch the robust birds
plunge headlong into kamikaze dives, lured
by fledgling trout nosed against the shallow ice.
Despite the precarious ice,
the children huddle bundled at the edge:
mittened, scarved, and starry-eyed,
their teeth chattering in the frosty air.
They watch the tireless birds, over and over,
fall from the speckled sky, their downy underwings
and pink, taloned leggings
foam soaked as they grapple with their catch.
The children are in love with the miraculous
oval-lipped trout swimming upward for air.
Snowflakes fall against their
cracked lips as they wait, their mouths agape
in little Os at the spectacle of gulls.
Heart of the Monarch
Lesser fritillaries or crescents might
have lost their tribe in the Piedmont,
or some wayward zone, sailing northward like
tiny spinnakers over upper-austral regions
of deciduous hickory and gum,
but near where flat coastal plains
verge westward across forests, overcome
by spring, the African-winged, black-veined
monarchs revive across the temperate
Mayish sky. Assembling each late noon
for sleep, the young bachelor males alight
in unison, the flash and dazzle of venation
klatched near a pond’s muddy crevasse.
This puddle club of monarchs, weary and peaceful,
dozes—unappetizing to the thrasher,
the rough-winged swallow, or the needle-
billed hummingbird—abdomens chock-full
of milkweed, foul-tasting to hungry fowl.
So this sleeping assembly, fearless, roosts till
morning, when the herd ascends, their spiracles
yawning as they make their way, steadfast.
Out of vivariums, out of seclusion
from under stones and turfy grass, the half-
grown caterpillar emerges; out of unsewn
mats of silk; out of winter lethargy,
the hibernating chrysalis unruffles
its royal self, its larval life a wee
memory; out of the land of Nod, adults
begin their lazy, deliberate flights
(the conspicuous monarchs, mind you, not
the miniature, mimicking viceroy!)—
these flower-eating kings, farsighted,
as they make their way with antennae
precision across the psalm of America
toward Milwaukee and Manitoba.
There’s nothing to fear. They’re on their way.