The Look of Things: Poems

by Henri Cole

The poems in Henri Cole's third book, The Look of Things, voice the tension between the social and the spiritual life, between the desire for company and for solitude, between youth and the ravages of disease, between the American and the exotic.

Cole treats these conflicting concerns in tones sometimes satiric, sometimes elegiac, sometimes ruefully self-deprecating, sometimes harrowingly tragic. The vein of playfulness cannot obscure the social and domestic losses attending life, but joy is not forgotten, even when it is black-bordered by epitaph.

Though the ghost of formal verse haunts these poems, they allude to it without subservience. And Cole lifts the topics of everyday life into the symbolic order of reflection and structure without ever losing his awareness of their origins in the heart.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

71 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 1995

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

[Ije the Devourer of Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't always 'get' poetry so I don't really read much of it. Last year I read some poetry by one of my favourite authors and although I appreciated it I didn't really understand it.

I decided to read this volume of poems because I came across an interview with the author Henri Cole in One of Us - Lgbt Voices from New England: Interviews (with Updates) from Bay Windows and my interest was piqued. I wanted to know a bit more about him and so I decided to read this volume.

I enjoyed these poems. I don't think I understood all of them but I did enjoy the way the poems created pictures and stories in my imagination. I think if poems can do that, evoke images and inspire further thought, then they have achieved something. Some of these poems are so beautifully put together in a way that is hard to explain.

I shall be reading more of Henri Cole's poetry.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend who recommended this author is gay and enjoys traveling through Western Europe, which is precisely the point-of-view of these poems. However, the theme of the plight of a homosexual man is not something that interests me. Elements of craft? Couldn't appreciate ones that delight me or from which I could learn.

[Tristan]

Finished just before moving, so I don't have my copy. I didn't like it as much as Cole's later work, but it has some really stellar poems in it, mostly in the middle of the book if I remember correctly.

[Christina M Rau]

From journeying to a new world a la Columbus to medical strife and familial tales, Cole's poetry is deep, intriguiging, and skillful. The three sections are compelling, and I read it in about an hour. I now plan to own it. I can't get enough of his verse.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 C6894 1995

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Especially loved "Sacrament" and "The Roman Baths at Nimes"

[E. T. Brother · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a decent read.