Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

(Hardback)

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I take joy in considering my generation. I rewrite to be read, though I feel shame acknowledging it. Scattered among imposing trees, the ancient and the modern intersect, spreading germs of pain and happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink. The poems collected in Gravity and Center represent thirty years of work by one of America's finest living poets. Henri Cole has reconceived and mastered his own version of the sonnet. As he explains in his afterword, "I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn't mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some reason the lean, muscular body of the sonnet frees me to be simultaneously dignified and bold, to appear somewhat socialized though what I have to say may be eccentric or unethical, and, most important of all, to have aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world." Cole is both confessional and abstract, intimate and cosmopolitan, astringent and open to beauty. Whether he is writing about the contingencies of selfhood, the lives of animals and plants, or the violent events of the world, there is always the incandescence of language.

Reviews

"These sonnets embody all the best qualities of this poet's enviable economy of language, evocative imagery, wicked turns of phrase, and sheer lyrical genius . . . That Cole manages to range the wide spectrum of human experience within the 14 lines of the sonnet is testament both to the poet's craft and the form itself." --Diego Bez, Booklist (Starred Review)

"Henri Cole brings memory and emotion to life on the page in Gravity and Center. Landscapes of earth, sky, and water are the backdrop for emotions and desire, punctuated with unique fragrances and tastes that bring life to their sonnet form . . . Each one of the sonnets in this collection, taken from the last thirty years of his work, has his signature: raw, powerful, gritty emotion encased in elegant prose, each one unique, apart from their structure." --Janet Rodriguez, The Rumpus

"There's no easy resolution in this showcase of Cole's subtle and evocative rendering of the human experience." --Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

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 Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.