The Visible Man: Poems - Paperback

by Henri Cole (Author)

"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, "persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended in The Visible Man, particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man."

Front Jacket

Praised by Harold Bloom and many other critics and poets for his earlier collections, Henri Cole has grown steadily in poetic stature and importance. "To write what is human, not escapist," is his endeavor. Now he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book.
On being awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Henri Cole received the following citation:
"In a poetry nervously alive to the maladies of the contemporary, yet suffused by a rare apprehension of the delights of the senses, Henri Cole has relished the world while being unafraid to satirize it. In poems that are both decorative and plain-spoken he permits his readers to share a keen and unsentimental view of the oddities, horrors, and solaces surrounding them at the end of the twentieth century."

Author Biography

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, and was raised in Virginia. The recipient of many awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Award for his most recent book, Middle Earth, he is the author of four other books of poems.