Touch: Poems

Henri Cole's last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, "Touch", written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics - a mother's death, a lover's addiction, war - with a startling clarity. Cole's new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body - both its pleasures and its discontents - and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of midlife selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.