Henri Cole is a creaturely poet who makes no attempt to domesticate the beast with two backs. His collections are menageries burgeoning with analogies of the self seeking and finding likeness in creatures living and dead, alongside estranging descriptions of his own body. Despite the proliferation of analogies between body and animal, these creatures are not familiars, not friends, not symbols, adjuncts or heralds. These interlocutors appear not because they have been evoked or summoned, but as a matter of course: their own lives overlap with his. To respect them as distinct beings, and not merely as representations, is one of the signal strengths of his poetry. “Pillowcase With Praying Mantis,” from Middle Earth (2003), begins without preamble: “I found a praying mantis on my pillow. / ‘What are you praying for?’ I asked. ‘Can you pray / for my father’s soul, grasping after Mother?’” The capitalization is the only clue to his divided loyalties; “American Kestrel,” from Blackbird and Wolf, begins in passionate observation:
I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,
plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,
like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit
on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.
If you’ve seen a kestrel eating on a fire escape or on a windowsill, the simile comparing flesh to harp strings is perceptive, well-judged, without exaggeration; and “American” in this context sounds as neutral as it is: just part of the common name of a species.[1]
In the “Face of the Bee,” the first poem in Blizzard (2020), he asserts: “No one / is truly the owner of his own instincts, / but controlling them—this is civilization.” In his review of that collection, Dan Chiasson characterizes this as “dangerously naïve.”[2] But who is endangered by the poet’s naiveté? Why ignore that he’s begun this poem by speaking to a bee, and imagining it has a face. Addressing a creature allows the poet to speak without condescending, for he isn’t speaking to himself or addressing us. Querying a member of a buzzing choir, Cole, like Flannery O’Connor’s ideal Southerner, “is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence, and he knows that a taste for self-preservation can be readily combined with the missionary spirit.” What’s more, Cole’s “this” leaves open the possibility that the epigrammatic conclusion coming after the em-dash is not a restatement of what comes before so much as a reminder of what the poet might or might not avow: that instincts must be answered by a stronger force that is not and can never be an equal and opposite reaction. Reading and rereading Cole, one gathers that to be civilized isn’t to control one’s instincts so much as to be able to take a forgiving view of the not-always-welcome failures to control them; and controlled is understood as a synonym for tamed, and taming is the first step in the process ending in domestication. “Face of the Bee” is an ars poetica, ending
With your fuzzy black face, do you see me—
a cisgender male—metabolizing
life into language, like nectar sipped
up and regurgitated into gold?
His first three books were written in the tailored shadow of the patrician James Merrill, and then came the break announced by “Arte Povera,” the first poem in The Visible Man (1998), a seminal book in multiple senses.
In the little garden of Villa Sciarra,
I found a decade of poetry dead.
In the limestone fountain lay lizards
and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source.
With its history as a retreat for the blood aristocracy, before becoming the property of a succession of plutocrats, the garden of Villa Sciarra, with its aviary, is a promising stage for a crisis. Not quite four centuries after the land was bought to build an estate, and after cycling through several owners and remodels, in 1932 it was given by Henrietta Tower, the widow of the final owner, to Mussolini, “on condition it became a public park.”[3] One means of salvaging or subverting public space co-opted for fascist ends is to revive it as the setting of an ongoing private struggle. For the struggle to locate—or relocate—the self back into the truths we hold self-evident can be staged anywhere, at any moment.
When Guy Davenport titles a marvelous book of criticism with the words of Mother Ann Lee, “every force evolves a form,” he means the form essential to what Dickinson describes as “formal feeling.”[4] Cole’s impulse to break with tradition is constrained by a storied form, the sonnet, and by the presence of creatures that can be caged but never denatured. The poem announces the breaking of a style, but not a break with style; “Arte Povera” and the rest of The Visible Man is very stylish. The third stanza is a terrifying list:
Nearby, a gas-light shone its white-hot tongue,
a baby spat up—the stomach’s truth-telling—
a mad boy made a scene worthy of Stalin.
Ah, to see the beast shitting in its cage!
With a tongue to stick out, a flame might speak. Yet the subsequent line suggests that showing “its white-hot tongue” is a preverbal form of communication, a child’s means of expression or a childish insult. From this point forward, Cole’s poetics will be metabolic. A baby’s spit-up tells the truth of what’s inside us just as well as ejaculate; and the last line is not a confession of scopophilia but renunciation expressed as pleasure at the sight of what is conventionally held to be disgusting. Yet the pleasure we might take in watching any creature confined for our delectation to pacing, lazing, shitting, copulating, is never as simple as what it appears to be. The bars, civilized and barbaric at once, constrain the poet’s pleasure as much as the creature’s life. The word “beast” has a long history as a term of endearment for domesticated animals, and this adds to the effect: the exclamation only rises so high; the voyeur only risks so much: the self cannot escape the form it elects.
And yet the poet, risking everything, goes to or beyond a limit; the third of these four lines does not go down—or come back up—so easily. Almost never without its attendant, the preposition “of,” the adjective “worthy” is freighted with irony. The Oxford American College Dictionary has the plain sense as “deserving effort, attention, or respect,” while the plural is characterized as “often derogatory.” The adjective “mad” contains both senses, with a finger on the scale favoring the synonym for insane. Any scene “worthy of Stalin” must be excessive, possibly murderous; yet whether the epithet praises or mocks, Stalin cannot be among the “worthies.” A generic child might be a tyrant, pure id; and yet a generic child is not a beast, even if said child might freely shit in public or scream down the trees. The proper name “Stalin” sticks out in a way that the name of an individual creature—which would be the name of a species—never could.[5] Proper nouns—names of persons, places, brands—have inescapable associations, and their present incarnations have an invidious supremacy.[6] Whether ironic or deadly serious, the adjective “worthy” is too soft on its subject; and if hyperbole, the trope escapes the poet. But this is not a failure so much as the consequence of breaking, completely, with the refinements of a style Cole found insufficient to account for his life and times. The millennium did not promise relief from AIDS, one crisis among several.
“Arte Povera” rehearses and develops the old—false—dichotomy between classical restraint and plain speech, and between the paired terms Trilling defines early in Sincerity and Authenticity, which is not to say that the feelings expressed are in any way false. Authenticity being “a more strenuous moral experience that ‘sincerity’ [. . .], a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in,” (or, in Cole’s phrase: “the stomach’s truth-telling”).[7] As if words might be spewed out of the mouths of babes and committed poets, bypassing lungs and larynx completely. The final couplet, with its suggestive doubling of lying to a real parent and the true lie one tells a dominant partner, “changes nothing.” The truth is another casualty of the pursuit of the authentic, which must make inevitable, natural allowances for dramatic—and melodramatic—changes of heart and mind. The family situation in Cole’s poems is never strictly Oedipal, except for those times when it is terrifyingly so (see “Chiffon Morning”). Some of his most remarkable, anguished poems are about his parents, while one might never know from reading his work that he has four brothers, except that Blackbird and Wolf (2007) is dedicated to them. The final line of “Arte Povera”—“My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain”—provides more evidence that Cole’s objective correlatives are creatures: beasts, and birds and bees, real and proverbial; and more evidence of Cole’s sensitivity to the idioms. Had he taken the conventional spirit “animal,” the assonance of “soul” and “choke” would have been lost.[8]
2
Since Man, Cole has written more sonnets, or more poems of fourteen lines, than poems in any other form, and in interviews he has spoken of the importance of—the ideal of—the volta, or “turn” of thought that belongs to the sonnet form. Rather than essay whether his many fourteen-line poems are Petrarchan, Shakespearean or some modern hybrid sonnet form, it is more constructive, I think, to accept his capacious definition. This, from the Afterword to his Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets 1994-2022: “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.” “He has made the form his own,” Chiasson asserts, before offering this useful summary: “often they begin loose-limbed and amiable, with an anecdote, then fall through a trapdoor of reminiscence and rue.”[9] I would add that the anecdote often arises in an encounter with a creature.
Horses, living and dead, appear throughout his work, as do other domestic animals, though dogs only rarely. The majority of creatures appearing in Cole’s poems are wild in the sense that they remain incompletely unassimilable to a poem’s, and the poet’s, experience. The Marble Queen (1986) his first book and a collection about which he has expressed reservations, includes “The Mare,” “The Beavers at Sweet Briar,” “Heart of a Monarch,” “Of Island Animals” “The Octopus Orchid.” Plus, there is “Canard,” which may be a—French—duck or “an unfounded rumor or story,” and “Diana and the Adder.”[10] “V-Winged and Hoary,” the first poem in Queen, is a little ornithological treatise that ends with children watching in wonder as “Iceland gulls” dive through a hole in the ice for the rising trout. The Visible Man has “Horses” and “Black Mane.” The exceptional Nothing to Declare (2015) opens with “City Horse” and includes “Gelding.com.” In Blizzard (2020), he gives us the explicitly political “Migrants Devouring the Flesh of a Dead Horse.” Middle Earth includes “The Hare,” “Swans,” “Ape House, Berlin Zoo,” “Landscape with Deer and Figure,” “Crows in Evening Glow,” “Cleaning the Elephant,” “Myself with Cats,” “Pillowcase with Praying Mantis,” “Melon and Insects,” “Fish and Watergrass” and “Medusa.”
A harmless sea creature, the Medusa is better known as the Gorgon, a terrifying mythical monstrosity.[11] The sonnet by that name, however, begins with vultures and wood storks, and ends with this six-line sentence:
When I poked the wet, mahogany mud,
it felt like something human I had my hand on,
as if the earth were a girl’s black-haired head
being lifted up in a great clatter that ebbed
and flowed, like sea foam or a red sky or pain
obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel.
An echo of Seamus Heaney’s “Strange Fruit” is audible, and the head examined in that poem is a mythological medusa that can stone the presumptuous. Heaney’s anonymous victim is a “Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible / Beheaded girl, outstaring axe / And beatification, outstaring / What had begun to feel like reverence.” Who reveres this decapitated girl? Performers of that ancient rite of human sacrifice, or the poet reviving the sacrifice in and as a poem? The invocation of the girl’s decapitated head preserved by the bog juices is alive in Cole’s “mahogany mud,” and the sacred occasion is present earlier in the same poem, in his vultures “perched stiffly, like little martyred saints, with gaudy / red heads.” To compare martyred saints to carrion-eaters is Cole’s fine idea of a joke. Cole is a cat person but not a cat; he has a sense of humor, but when laughter barges in, it rarely offers relief. As the vultures do here, creatures minimize the risk that Cole might take himself too seriously, or affirm too strongly. Which is not to say that creatures embalm the poems in irony.[12] It is in the volta, if that’s what it is, that wood storks appear. The large, awkward birds “conveyed their own way of being, / not debunking violence but commingling with it, / as if freedom meant proximity to danger.” One wonders what else freedom might be: it cannot be proximity to safety, though it is too often mistaken for what allows us to make only ourselves safe.
Cole’s allusion to Heaney’s renowned bog poems is a friendly nod, and not without risk. The younger poet interviewed the elder for The Paris Review, “The Art of Poetry No. 75”; they were colleagues when Cole taught for five years at Harvard. One of his rare prose pieces is an account of a meal shared with the by-then famous and recognizable Heaney; and The Other Love contains an elegy, “Lament for the Maker.”[13] Both poets share a desire for clarity, for an immediately apprehensible sensuous surface that makes their least successful poems no better than lineated prose. Roy Foster, author of a short biography of the Irish Nobel Laureate, is astute on what distinguishes Heaney from his talented cohort of Irish poets, writing: “The odd contract he had forged with his readership was based not only on their affection for him as a poet but on a belief that he recorded something shared and essential, and that they knew that he could be trusted.”[14] Foster understates, I think, the possessive affection the Irish had and have for Heaney; their Poet was trusted even by those who didn’t particularly like his work. Loved and resented, he became too big to denounce. Impossible to deny that Heaney grew to fill the role he was given, the mask as mobile as his face. I doubt any other poet will ever again be as popular, and will earn the praise of judges and critics, never mind selling a million copies of his poems and translations, as Heaney did in his lifetime. Well-awarded, with an endowed chair at Claremont-McKenna College, Cole does not have that kind of trusting readership; no American poet is as trusted, nor do I believe an American poet could earn it in our militant aesthetic situation.
Hard to recall the hue and cry that greeted Heaney’s North, not all of it praise, now that he has become an epitome and an enduring publishing phenomenon with three posthumous doorstops appearing in the last four years.[15] Ciaran Carson, another Northern Irish poet with his own complicated relationship to The Troubles, denounced Heaney in The Honest Ulsterman as “the laureate of violence—a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing.”[16] True, Heaney’s bog poems risk the glamor of the war photographer who cannot help but see beauty which is not just the beginning of terror, but its end.[17] In his Paris Review interview with Sasha Weiss, Cole recalls his teacher Richard Howard’s definition: “Poetry is organized violence!”[18] Howard came out with this during a class devoted to reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight”; and while a bite of life may be as prosaic as a slice, it is ever so much more intimate to serve up and take in. Imagining violence, one cannot escape the risk of doing violence; one must risk it, otherwise the imagination has failed to see into the shadows imagined objects cast, for only in the movies is the ‘real’ lit from its best side. Carefully weighing Robert Lowell’s words, Christopher Ricks anatomizes: “For this is the nemesis that lies in wait for all imaginings of violence, even or especially the denunciations of violence: that to imagine it may be to collude with and to minister to it.”[19] In his search for analogies to desire, Cole has flirted with collusion, cavorted with violent similes, and it is only his wondering tone that has kept his analogies from becoming excesses, such as the involved simile ending in a list in the sextet of “Medusa.” Could the process of lifting this figure of mud, this decapitated head, be like any or all these things: “sea foam or a red sky or pain / obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel”? No matter how the question is answered, tone does not grant complete immunity from what words mean.[20] To think it could gives too much credit to the authentic as Trilling defines it.
When Cole had doubts about the sexual frankness of The Visible Man, “[Heaney] told me the poems were a record of something in ‘the arena of human emotion.’ The most important thing was to contribute something to the arena of human emotion, he insisted. I’ve never forgotten this.”[21] Heaney’s ideal affirms what might be Cole’s most famous summary of his intention, from the 10th section of “Apollo,” the superb final sequence in Man: “To write what is human, not escapist: / that is the problem of the hand moving / apart from the body.” The first line often appears in blurbs without what follows, and so floats free and becomes definitive, while the complete sentence is a paradox. The arena of human emotion is wide as a colosseum, ludic, violent, bestial. Yet what the hand writes, even when it writes of encounters with creatures, is always at a remove from, as Cole puts it in “Blur,” the “marrowy / emissions, the gasping made liquid.” Cole is not one of those poets gasping in ink.
Cole might be the laureate of creaturely desire among contemporary poets (whereas Frank Bidart might be laureate of human desire escaping the creaturely). Cole suffers for and from desire; desire modifies, sometimes terribly, his experience of his body, and yet Cole concurs with and finds solace in what Whitman says about creatures: they are not “respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.” And, finally, he is reconciled to the fact that he is more creaturely than he might wish. The enduring value of creatures to Cole and to his poetry is, to paraphrase immortal words of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in Singin’ in the Rain, a star supremely apart, “they ain’t people!”[22] Likeness to creatures, then, is ultimately impossible; he attempts a form of decentering, of othering the self and keeping us, his readers, at a distance. In “At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop,” one of the few poems in Middle Earth that is not a sonnet, the longer he pursues his likeness to a cat, the more alienating likeness becomes, and all the while he plays at being the tame lion to her St. Jerome.
3
The final sequence in Middle Earth, “Blur,” opens grandly. “It was a Christian idea, sacrificing / -oneself to attain the object of one’s desire.” As the first couplet of a poem about desire, blurring the needs of body and soul, this verges on the sacrilegious. The title is multivalent, alive to the common sense of an adjective describing a stretch of lost time and to a loss of boundaries between self and other. The stakes here are far higher than some ordinary therapeutic operation or corrective lenses could repair. In the fourth section—each section is of 14 lines—the word “flesh” appears ten times. The effect is startling, and yet the word never becomes it; desire is not consecrated or profaned, but remains inalienably creaturely. The poem remembers the pursuit of pleasure, of debasement that amounts to the sacrifice of the values that make a self whole—and yet even at this extreme, the volume of Cole’s poetry is the speaking voice: “All the things I loved [ . . .] presupposed / a sense of self locked up in a sphere, / which would never be known to anyone.” An account of ardent defenselessness, the sequence ends in love-making: “I, flesh-to-flesh, sating myself / on blurred odors of the soft black earth.” The consonants inflect the “o” sounds of the vowels in “on,” “odors” and “soft,” lending the line an aural delicacy that belies what might be a cryptic image of death, of loving unto death. Yet I am not convinced that Cole would be satisfied by the sound of sense at the expense of meaning.
Among the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, found at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald, striving for ever greater compression, typed: “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” For Cole, action is declaration, and declaration reveals character and suggests a plot, which is one of the reasons why so many of the poems in Nothing to Declare compel. Most of Middle Earth was written during Cole’s year-long stay in Japan, the country of his birth, and much of The Visible Man is set in Italy, while the poet of Nothing to Declare has returned to his own homely materials. Take the extraordinary “Lightning Towards Morning,” which demythologizes Heaney’s Tollund Man. Cole, to use Heaney’s word, “ghostifies” himself, but writes from the perspective of a murdered corpse soon to be discovered by the cops, and examiners in latex gloves. Consider a poem written with a view of the authorities opening the coffin of Abraham Lincoln “to make a slight adjustment / in the position to the body.” Or “The Lonely Domain,” with its epigraph from Dickinson (“A Coffin—is a small Domain”), a plot taken for a plot, that opens with the arrival of an androgynous, creaturely, distinctly un-Christ-like carpenter:
She had a bleeding vagina but no bosom
and a man’s voice that barked, “Shut the fuck up,”
as she carried a carpenter’s bench to the kitchen
and chose some boards from the yard.
Yet no poem in this book of poems that have the simplicity and stringency of samplers, is as unsparing as “Sphere,” which is that rare thing, an excremental vision. A son remembers his father, a man not inclined to believe that austerity affords any consolation, not when there is liquor, and petty crime, and a noirish fatalistic sense of life as pure appetite to be slaked even on the dregs. Again, the opening is novelistic, Southern but not Gothic: “‘Sir, I don’t have no black tea,’ the waitress replied, / so I ordered Black Label instead.” The use of dialect might suggest that the waitress is Black, and the word “black” appears twenty-three times in twenty of the poem’s twenty-two lines, referring only once to the race of a person, a surgeon. Capitalized three times (a brand of scotch, in the proper name of a college, and as AIDS, which Cole calls here “the Black Death,” only to add, in parenthesis, “(I shouldn’t call it that)”); once as part of the colloquial name for chickadees, “blackcaps,” once as part of the past participle “blacked out,” once in “blacktop.” About two-thirds of the way around “Sphere,” this father confesses to his son or to himself, the son a reservoir for the truth and its instrument: “(‘Son, you got mixed blood.’).” Tactfully the poet cups the hands of a parenthesis around this admission, as if genealogy were the sort of information reserved for—and gently mocked by—a headstone. After twenty long lines of blank verse, “Sphere” ends with a rhymed couplet of two questions that may or may not be answerable (they are certainly not rhetorical). To ask whether this son, a poet, loved his father “with all my heart / and all my liver,” to invoke the so-called ‘silent organ’ that releases bile and digests alcohol, as one of the harbors of love, is to reinforce, again, Cole’s metabolic poetics.
4
Blizzard began with a fresh ars poetica, “Face of the Bee,” and Cole’s latest, The Other Love (2025), begins more modestly, with “Mouse in the Grocery”:
There are no bacon strips this morning,
so a mouse ponders a pound of sugar.
A mouse wants what a mouse wants,
salt-cured pork instead of soluble carbs.
A mouse is not a beast, and though the sight of vermin is never welcome, this creature’s tastes are almost human. Yet what begins in wry identification, analogy complicates:
A mouse is like a heart: it sleeps in winter;
it knows uncertain love; it appears to have no gender.
Now the mouse contemplates a woman sprinkling water
on lettuce as a man pushes a broom up the aisle.
We don’t often think of the gender of our vermin, companions thriving in our degraded environments, and the off-rhymes proceeding from “gender” to “winter” to “water” are suggestive, but the poet, now 70, is cautious, chastened. In her review of Gravity and Center (2023), Daisy Fried didn’t quite commit to a striking claim: “Cole’s sonnets are always ending up somewhere other than where they began, and Cole appears to perceive this as a moral responsibility, not simply as an aesthetic or formal one.”[23] If it only “appears” so, is it so? Cole’s aesthetic and formal approach has evolved, and the morals of his stories have changed. While the ninth line announces something that Cole has always believed— “None of us knows what to expect out there”—, he goes on to itemize the inevitable:
Surely pain is to be part of it,
and the unwelcome intrusion of the past,
like violent weather that makes a grim chiaroscuro
of the air before a curtain of rainwater falls.
There is no longer finality, as if the balance of desire and loss has tipped, definitively, towards acceptance. This fourteen-line poem closes: “I clutch my basket and push on.” We are very far from the poet of “Blur,” then so ravenous for flesh, so consumed by desire, he could almost be mistaken for a genial cannibal.
Though the struggles are not as violent as they once were, these late poems often arrive at defeat; and often, at this low point, after circumstances or outrages have left the poet beaten down, he finds again his feet, paws, hooves, and says something like this, from the late “Gay Bingo At the Pasadena Animal Shelter”:
The person I call myself—elegant, libidinous, austere—
is older than many buildings here, where time moves too swiftly,
taking the measure of my body, like hot sand or a hand leaving its mark,
and the bright sunlight blurs the days into one another.
Still, the sleeping heart awakens,
and, pricked and fed, it grows plump again.
It must be said that to be “pricked and fed” might be sexual. Then again, it might describe the life of an animal raised for slaughtering.
If there was ever time when Cole was in thrall to his creaturely nature, with what he cannot escape or deny about himself, he no longer is. There are other loves than the love for flesh and its marrowy satisfactions. And the creatures, too, have matured; this “Mouse in the Grocery” escapes from analogy back into something complete in itself. While the desire for company may be undiminished, the satisfactions might be more attenuated, and only his need to be alone remains as it has always been, inviolate. That need was expressed beautifully in a poem from Blackbird and Wolf. Here the final two-and-a-half lines of “Oil and Steel,” one of his finest poems, so exquisitely does comedy dog the sadness (and yes, dogs haunt this poem): “this man who never showed / me much affection but gave me a knack / for solitude, which has been mostly useful.” The man in question is again Cole’s father, the son’s inheritance “a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet / and some motor oil,” and this “knack”— a small, casual word, exact for this poet’s necessary, gently misanthropic, self-sufficiency.
Footnotes
- And Cole is aware, as he observed in a piece about John Berryman in The New Yorker, April 6, 2016, that “to the ancient Greeks, anything lyrikos was considered appropriate for the lyre, the elegant stringed instrument that was highly regarded by them and played as an accompaniment to unarmored or personal poetry.” ↑
- “Critical Distances,” Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, Vol. 96 Issue 29, 09/28/2020, 69-70 ↑
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Sciarra_(Rome). First accessed on 11/19/25 Cole’s poem may allude to Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” But if so, the allusion is not the source of its strength. ↑
- Davenport opens his Foreword: “My title, which sounds like Heraclitus or Darwin, is from Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), founder of the Shakers.” ↑
- For instance: even though he has not been in office a year, to mention New York now is to call to mind that political prodigy Zorhan Mamdani. Closer to the poem, it’s possible that it might mean something quite different to a lifelong resident of Rome who lived the history of Villa Sciarra more intimately. ↑
- Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1972, 11. ↑
- A “soul-animal” prowls through the final lines of “Mud and Flesh” in Nothing to Declare. ↑
- Chiasson, op. cit. ↑
- According to the Oxford American College Dictionary, a “canard” is also and—much less likely—“a small winglike projection attached to an aircraft forward of the main wing to provide extra stability or control,” which seems an unlikely subject for a poem. I mention it only to recall multivalence makes for strange bedfellows. ↑
- “A terrible monster in Greek mythology, Gorgo was their daughter of the marine deities Phocrys and Ceto. She had a round, ugly face, snakes instead of hair, a belt of the teeth of a boar, sometimes a beard, huge wings, and eyes that could transform people into stone.” Oxford Classical Dictionary, Second Edition, edited by N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, Clarendon Press, 1970. ↑
- Cole has never exhibited symptoms, arising from corrosive doubt, of the chronic contemporary condition of ironitis: afraid of being seen to take seriously the ‘wrong’ things, afraid of appearing insufficiently exercised by the ‘right’ things, renders one terminally unserious. Better still, his seriousness never becomes solemnity. ↑
- “Dinner with Seamus Heaney: A Remembrance,” The New Republic, August 8, 2023. ↑
- Roy Foster, On Seamus Heaney, Princeton University Press, 2020, 201 ↑
- The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2022), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2023) and The Poems of Seamus Heaney (2025) add up to 2757 pages. ↑
- This phrase of Carson’s might characterize Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, if only for their least perceptive critics. ↑
- See for instance, the work of James Nachtway: the single sufferers of wars, famines and death camps are shot in silvery black-and-white, “Industrial Pollution” in flaming color. ↑
- “The Art of Poetry No. 98”, The Paris Review, 209, Summer 2014. ↑
- Christopher Ricks’s “Robert Lowell: ‘The war of words’” in The Force of Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1984, 257. Ricks makes a convincing case that Lowell is the laureate of violence. ↑
- This is, I think, part of what Geoffrey Hill is trying to get at in his criticism of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. Eliot sank to tone rather than continuing to work in the more mixed, demanding register—or unforgiving material— that is pitch. ↑
- “The Art of Poetry No. 98,” op. cit. ↑
- Her (in)exact words are, “I ain’t people!” ↑
- Daisy Fried, “The Shape of Thoughts,” The New York Times, 04/18/23 ↑