Cole's New Look
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers &Writing COLE'S NEW LOOK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL AN ASTUTE CRITIC I know has observed that it is not uncommon for young would-be poets to produce one, perhaps two "promising" collections...
...It's the third volume, he says, that really tells...
...Ex-Voto" takes place at a garden party where the guests discuss "religious art/where human grief is averted" by the intervention of the saints...
...Three years later...
...In a Mediterranean seaside village where the poem's narrator lived for a year "under burnt orange ceramic roofs/ sloped whimsically as in a child's drawing," all the initial images are of simplicity and comfort...
...His playful, urbane verses sparkled with beguiling conceits, plus a keen perception of what Freud termed "the interior family drama" we all project upon the people who surround us...
...Although one of poetry's emotionally potent genres, elegy also often tempts writers to fall back on half-truths and platitudes...
...Far off, an ambulance wails on the horizon...
...As lam converted from boredom to elation when a swarm of bees hastens upon our gathering: though squirted with gas...
...Even standing bare, whichever way he turns he leaves no traces: the bed that looks unslept-in...
...readers may even be reminded of the atmosphere in John Le Carre's novels, where innocents fight for their integrity in a treacherous world...
...Could he have been right who said there was earth and man/in the beginning, that we created God, that we created Heaven,/in our want or need for something more than awful elegy...
...Watching this spectacle, the narrator remarks: It was not until long afterward that she revealed to me how the charmed serpents that afternoon had signified what irreparable harm had already been done to her by her lover s smoldering daisy chain of virus...
...The poet leads us from naive pleasure in a pastoral village, through the realization that it has no immunity from the threat of death, to a kind of heroic defiance of defeat and despair...
...It is All Saints' Day...
...The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge exhibited a fresh, childlike eye for the wonder in familiar sights and a probing intelligence alert to irony as well as ambivalence...
...Henri Cole's The Look of Things (Knopf, 71 pp., $20.00) splendidly confirms the genuineness of his talent...
...Though frequently sad, the darkness of these poems does not overwhelm the reader because there are so many moments when the clouds lift and joy happily breaks through...
...Depressed by these stilted little hagiographies that merely emphasize the wounded lives of those who relate them, Cole experiences his own natural epiphany: Couldn't it be too much is made of our conversions, when in fact they happen—though not dramatic or miraculous—in small ways every day...
...Carnations" joins descriptions of the condition of an afflicted acquaintance and the poet's contemplation of Delacroix' painting of a Natchez Indian couple who have briefly halted their journey down the Mississippi for the birth of their child: The sky, as if flesh, grows black and blue...
...Wisely, Cole opens himself up to exploring the harder realities we are inclined to shy away from: that the universe is indifferent to our suffering...
...The speaker and "a soprano" he chances to meet at a cafe, a woman who has broken off an affair, watch as Moroccan street performers unroll a carpet before them and set twin cobras weaving to the music of a horn...
...In "Une Lettred New York...
...anger in the face of loss alternates with moments of blinding, transcendent joy...
...Flower vendors are selling carnations to adorn the dead...
...COLE'S EROTIC FRANKNESS matches his unblinking examination of death in "Buddha and the Seven Tiger Cubs": I sit in a little red gazebo and think— as the Zen monks do about what love means...
...The newly visible Henri Cole sports an honest conscience, is inclined to be terribly hard on his motives, and yet is full of compassion for everyone around him...
...the bathroom mirror nibbed of fog: the bright shower stall rinsed of win grar hairs weeded from his chest...
...The unfolding story thus has a suspenseful quality...
...Seeing another person with the understanding that makes him real removes the protective barrier shielding us from hurt and loss...
...that our culture is not quite sure about what to make of either life or death...
...How many times can one find original words to convey anger at the universe, or predictable self-pity in the face of loss...
...And most of the time he is happy since no one guesses what was so cleverly repressed...
...On a literal level, the poem's title appears to allude to any part of Southern Europe where citrus trees thrive...
...the desire to be loved conflicts with a yearning for solitude and autonomy...
...The manner was impressive, but what kind of person hid beneath its surface...
...Cole's own word-painting, which derives its chiaroscuro from emotional shading, is true to Stevens' stress on imaginative vision...
...Actually, it is drawn from Goethe's wistful "Kennstdu das Land...
...Wallace Stevens' "A Postcard from the Volcano" is the source of the book's title and of an epigraph referring to those who, after we are dead and gone, "least will guess that with our bones/ We left much more, left what still is/The look of things, left what we felt/At what we saw...
...In poem after poem Cole evokes the relentless destructiveness of the epidemic—not only the canceling of young lives, but the loss of the feeling of safety we had prized in sexual intimacy...
...he tells his epistolary friends...
...For Cole, who was born in Fukuoka, Japan, Hiroshima is very real...
...By that standard...
...Each of you who writes reports illness, pain from love spilt./or someone who's gone to the other side, yet correspondence tries/ to be uplifting, disproving Judas who writes man's sad history...
...Cole's toughness—his lines about the pitilessness of existence and art's merciless facsimile—lifts this poem above the limitations of contemporary elegy...
...The House Guest Looks at Love and Life" fashions a gently self-mocking portrait of a "perfect guest" whose "presence is felt by his gift for what/ his friends regard as his charming invisibility...
...Back in the present, as Cole's friend is dying...
...In The Look of Things Cole answers that question...
...Missing from these graceful performances, though, was any indication of the author's vulnerability...
...Traveling through a series of mythic landscapes, the narrator and the diva come at last to a field where "gigantic/steel pylons, shouldering high-voltage wires/stood erect as stick-figure men drawn to defend/us and the wild unaffected poppies...
...wodieZitro-nen bliihn...
...Writers &Writing COLE'S NEW LOOK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL AN ASTUTE CRITIC I know has observed that it is not uncommon for young would-be poets to produce one, perhaps two "promising" collections before degenerating into mediocrity...
...Yet a snake—or rather, two— eventually creep into this Eden...
...Cole has abandoned this invisible man to pursue the risky enterprise of "the heart excavating itself," as one poem puts it...
...From this point on, the verse turns into a fairy-tale quest for some magic to avert the tragic, foreordained outcome...
...His previous guarded language yields to a new openness that overcomes the impulse to cling to privacy...
...that we can bear just so much fear and deep emotion before retreating into our shells...
...Art, like life, is pitiless...
...His lyrics here resonate with regret and sexual longing...
...Little G Minor Lament" freezes the moment when a mushroom cloud rose above the painted lagoon, and children heard queer words, heads bowed: atom, fission, radiation...
...the song of yearning for a lost childhood home that Mignon sings in Wilhelm Meister (and that Cole's soprano might well have performed in one of the operas the work inspired...
...So is the devastation now being caused by aids that almost equals the collective anxiety about nuclear war...
...As frequently happens with youthful formalists, the shimmering display of technical, artistic and intellectual virtuosity became a distancing armor...
...they seem too cheerfully engorged with honey- to sting and ascend peaceably into the air...
...unashamed to have known it as something tawdry and elusive from watching lean erotic dancers in one of the dives on Stark Street, where I go some lovesick nights...
...The intertwined reptiles suggest the twisted strands of viral growth, or possibly the broken double helix of damaged DNA...
...Now that he has emerged from his shell to expose his candid and appealing imagination, one eagerly looks forward to his subsequent revelations...
...A sense of endangered innocence permeates The Look of Things...
...Cole's new verse not only takes this risk but elevates it to a quasireligious sacrifice, embracing whatever may follow...
...Eyeing a particular male dancer in this theater of desire, the poet concludes: "I am transfixed,/loving him as tiger cubs love their/mother who abandons them forever...
...like women taking baskets home, unadmittedly heavy...
...When Cole's The Marble Queen appeared in 1986, readers were surprised to discover that he was just beginning...
...An excellent example of Cole's current style is "Land of Lemons...
...This admission of what delights him proves to be as disarm-ingly direct as the probings of his fears and sadness...
Vol. 78 • March 1995 • No. 3
