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    Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007
    Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007
    Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007
    Ebook129 pages33 minutes

    Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007

    By Henri Cole

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 12, 2014
    ISBN9781466877771
    Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007
    Author

    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.

      The

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