Norma Cole – författare

The inaugural volume in the new Spotlight poetry series, Where Shadows Will selects from twenty years of innovative poetry by writer, painter, and translator Norma Cole. Cole has been a fixture of the Bay Area scene since 1977, writing melodic and experimental poetry whose shadow-haunted landscapes embody an exploration of the relationship between language, self, and world. Cole was a member of the circle of poets around Robert Duncan and a fellow traveler of the language poets. Drawing on long out-of-print volumes and recent books-such as her acclaimed Spinoza in Her Youth (2002)-Where Shadows Will confirms Cole's place as a major avant-garde poet and a leading voice among contemporary women writers.

All timing all the time! Fate News is poetry in the crosshairs of action (kairos) and clock time (chronos). With a topical setlist in four sections, “Local,” “On-Going,” “Stay Songs,” and “Harmolodics,” Fate News relentlessly pierces the surface of lyric gesture. Its osmotic exchanges and searching encounters vibrate with the clarity of fiercely delicate shouts and murmurs, undertones and overtones. The vision of “Mount Fiasco” is on fire.

A collection of poems that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events.  Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”  In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.