Touch: Poems

by Henri Cole

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 mid-life 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.

 

Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

 

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Gay

67 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 2011

About the author

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are Orphic Paris, a memoir (New York Review Books), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.

Reviews

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dealing with the death of his mother, the memory of his alcoholic father, and a destructive relationship with an addict as Cole mourns, this collection is surprisingly very low-key. Perhaps it is the way he turns to the animal world to help understand the very primal emotions he is dealing with as well as his deft use of a sonnet variant in many poems that gives the poems a quiet dignity. There is one very unfortunate poem that alternates lines from a teenage torture victim of state violence with what I took to be Cole talking to his addict-lover -- this poem mars the volume overall and seems to be an unfortunate homage to Frank Bidart. But otherwise, I really loved this volume and read it as I listened to Sufjan Stevens' equally quiet grieving album, "Carrie + Lowell" -- a perfect companion piece to this collection.

[Noaman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gazing into the bar mirror,
my brow and jaw less pronounced than my father's,
weary at the neck, I want to be real, to think, to live.
I want to press my face up to the glass and climb out.

--- "Bloodstains"

[Christina Borgoyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is great depth to this little collection of poems by Henri Cole.

[Hazel (Stay Bookish) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating: 3.5

[Joy Cagil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Touch is a collection of poetry from the pen of a much admired, sensitive poet, with an insight of his environment, a keen perception of his own life, his past, and the animal kingdom. The book is in three parts, with a quote from someone else at the beginning of each part. In the first two parts, there are 14 poems for each part and 16 at the third part.

The first part is mostly about his reminiscences of his early life and especially of his mother. Here, the poet not only re-lives his childhood but also the somberness of his parents’ lives and relationship. If it is an animal he is writing about, that animal can act as a metaphor for his family or someone in his family.

Another aspect of his poetry is his mixing what it bright or solid with what is gloomy and mournful. The poem Shrike especially affected me because it is so human and personal for the poet. The poem begins with the admiration of the bird’s beauty and shows it catching a cricket whose pain the poet feels inside him and likens the cricket to his mother in the later lines of the poem, for as a child, he has heard his father’s abuse of his mother. “Upstairs in the bathroom, I drank water right out of the tap // my lips on the faucet. Everything was shaking and bumping. // Earth was drawing me into existence.”

His blending the beautiful with the ugly and accepting this combination shows in Cherry Blossom Storm again when he says, “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.”

Then, in Hens in the second part of the book, he repeats this feeling. “Suffering becomes // the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed; // too hard, and you’ll be broken.”

There are many poems in Touch that sing the praises of animals. Possibly the poet sees them as replicas of the spirits of love, gratitude, resilience, and sometimes freedom while associating with them emotionally.

The third part reflects the grown-up life of the poet with a few sections in the poems hinting at his love life, while he still blends the opposing feelings and thoughts so successfully, as in Away, when he says, “How poignantly emptiness cries out // to be filled.”

The gentleness of the words throughout the book emphasizes and highlights the pain and suffering powerfully. That may be why I loved reading this book so much, and I think each poem deserves to be read a few times and mulled over

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read Cole's Blackbird, and so I picked up this poetry book in a secondhand bookstore I frequent. Some poems are striking and the tone is quite melancholy, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat.

[amy boese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some poems really resonated, some seemed less personally exact, but all were a joy to run through my mind and read aloud. I really enjoyed this small potent book.

[R.G. Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems by a master of image and knock-out closing lines, rendering the personal and specific chillingly universal. Everyone mortal should read this book.

[Aidan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was touched........ by touch..

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this way OK, a collection of mostly short lyrics. There are a lot of poems about his mother's death here, which are moving but almost feel like they get lost alongside the poems about animals and sea weed and others, that Cole's plain, mostly spare style maybe isn't durable enough to rise to the challenge of capturing his grief.... Strangely, the third section of this book breaks with the themes of the first two parts, the grief and the animals, and cracks open the form of the poems some, splitting lines and working line endings to impart some drama to the lyrics, which address physical love and being with addicts, etc. They didn't blow me away, but I thought they were markedly better than the earlier poems in the book.

[Amanda Judd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A gifted writer - not my personal favorite though. He creates some breath-taking metaphors. This book has three sections, the first seems to deal with his mother, and mostly her death. I found it to be, by far, the best section, of the book. The second section deals a lot with animals. "PIG" was my favorite. The last section seems to be a little all over the place, and in my opinion, was also the weakest poetically. This is the first book I've read by Mr. Cole. I will definitely be seeking out more.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - I didn't know what to expect of this collection, but I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoy one-page poems, they're easy to read, but sometimes, I found one that was missing something.

I would recommend this, though, to pretty much anyone, I will probably read it again myself. I found strength in the poems, and appreciated the honesty of grief.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mother sat up, rubbed her eyes drowsily, her breaths
like breakers, the living man the beach.

[meggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I looooooove Henri Cole. I checked out a bunch of his stuff from the library and have been flying through it!

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

heartrending

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

the nice thing about rereading poetry that u worked hard at unraveling before is that all my notes are still there! this is perhaps the first time I've run into useful penciled marks during a reread, which makes sense, because I didn't really get the hang of it til mid-college.

anyway Henri Cole is also one of the few people I like to revisit. touch is published with this lovely textured cover, and while it digs toward the darkness- a mother's death, a lovers addiction, war and murder- it is soft, removed, often gentle. often the nature allegories.

my favorites are the ones that get informal about love and loneliness, breaking the walls of natural remove into intense self-reflection and dropping a "ur" instead of a "you're."

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henri Cole's poem is filled with discrete and slightly surreal poems whose craft--and even whose quirk--display an undercurrent of intense pain. The poems revolve largely around dealing the death of his mother, processing the memory of his alcoholic father, and healing from a destructive relationship with an addict. The collection though, despite the pain and surreal touches, remains largely subdued and most of the emotional heft is in the undercurrent rather than the current of poems. Cole has a habit of seeming to meander even in short poems but to conclude on extremely final closing line. This has an particularly devastating effect in these very elegiac perms. This is not my favorite Cole collection but it is a strong one.

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall not bad excepting the trainwreck that is "By the name of God..." but many of them a little too cutesy for my taste. Nothing terribly stirring here though: "pleasant" is maybe the best qualifier, with its damned-with-faint-praise-connotations maybe halfway in place.

[Charity (Charity's Library)]

Really confusing. I couldn't tell when or how some people in the book were dying or if they actually were. (See confusing) and the sentence structure was all over the place-and not in a good way.