Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

by Henri Cole

New and selected sonnets from Henri Cole, a poet with “a quality of daring that is rare in our poetry” (Louise Glück).

I take joy in considering my generation. I rewrite
to be read, though I feel shame acknowledging it.
Scattered among imposing trees, the ancient
and the modern intersect, spreading germs of pain
and happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink.

Gravity and Center collects almost thirty years of deeply original work by one of America’s greatest living poets. As his writing has grown and changed, Henri Cole has conceived and articulated an approach of his own to one of poetry’s most enduring and challenging forms: the sonnet. Cole writes in his afterword, “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 . . . For some reason the lean, muscular body of the sonnet frees me to be simultaneously dignified and bold, to appear somewhat socialized though what I have to say may be eccentric or unethical, and, most important of all, to have aesthetic power while writing about the tragic situation of the individual in the world.”

Cole is both confessional and abstract, intimate and cosmopolitan, astringent and slain by beauty. Whether he is writing about the contingencies of selfhood, the lives of animals and plants, or the violent events of the world, there is always the incandescence of his language and the power and surprise of unique formal mastery.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer

192 pages, Hardcover

Published April 4, 2023

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

[Kendra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Cole's poetry is essential for poets and readers alike. Writing exclusively in 14-line forms, usually without rhyme (the so-called "American sonnet" form), Cole dives into his life and relationships, the mundane and the transcendental--sometimes in the same poem. I am both dazzled by these and brought down by their brutality. The intimacy is sometimes too much to bear, and I had to take breaks from reading this so as to grapple with individual poems. Cole's use of language is revelatory and bold and enormously creative. Highly recommended.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henri Cole is quickly becoming my new favorite poet, and accordingly, I'd like to give this 5 stars. But the poem implying the Biden presidency represented some new dawn for America, which was followed immediately by the "guns r bad" poem, force me to give a less-than-perfect rating if I'm going to be anything like intellectually honest.

Biden was and will go down in history as the overseer of genocides. His being nominally left-of-center does not remotely counterbalance that fact. Meanwhile, the anti-gun poem, while certainly less offensive, was no less emotionally lazy. The speaker of the poem seemed to be saying, "now that gun violence has personally affected me, I am invested in it."

Cole is a master of the surprising image, he can make a simile feel as convincing as a metaphor, and he enacts psychological drama within his sonnets like few poets working today. So please, read this collection, but be prepared for two big stumbles right at the end.

[Alana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I keep searching for a collection of poetry that I connect with. While there were a few here I enjoyed, most I found tedious and dull.

Standouts:

Chiffon Morning
Casablanca Lily
My Tea Ceremony
Oil & Steel
Birthday

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are a modified form of sonnet, each poem having 14 unrhymed lines, perhaps an octet and sestet, the final couplet sometimes constituting a switch in topic or a comment. Most of the poems come from previously published collections. (The afterword explains the inspiration of the sonnet to Cole.)

Cole definitely has technique, and uses themes that are fairly common in poetry with with notable style: nature imagery, reminiscenses about parents, sexual love, addiction, war. A Cole says, "Trees, mammals, fire, snow—they are like emotions."

I like Cole when he relaxes and riffs on an experience, as in the poems "Melon and Insects" and "My Tea Ceremony." Some other poems are also quite naturally evocative, such as "Gulls" and "Haircut." Simple language also works well as it leaves a bit of a question mark, as in the very ending of "Oil & Steel" where Cole says that his father "gave me a knack / for solitude, which has been mostly useful." His philosophy is sometimes quite intriguing ("How poignantly emptiness cries out to be filled"), sometimes a bit pat.

Sometimes, the parts don't quite add up. It's OK to assign the color pale yellow to emotional reassurance, but why should it be like onions? And take his phrase "A bee scribbled its essence between us." That's a clever way to invoke the errant motions of a bee, but Cole does not bring me any closer to the bee or to the person I'm with in the poem. The word "essence" is abstract and actually rendundant.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

ten years ago I pulled cole’s “Middle Earth” off the Hughes Main poetry shelves and read it by the window on the library’s second floor. I didn’t like it, gave it two stars, chalked up my disapproval to my developing taste in poetry, and told myself I’d never read another Cole book again because I wouldn’t have to. A few days ago I was in the Chapel Hill Public Library and saw this on a display rack. I vaguely remembered the name and took it home. I read each poem in this book twice in one night on a beanbag on Niya’s bedroom floor. Incredible, incredible poems. I guess that’s growth. And I guess that’s developing taste.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a fan of the traditional sonnet, whether Shakespearean or Petrarchan or Frostian, etc., I found these unrhymed, unmetered and prosy American-style sonnets to be lazy simulacra. It’s precisely the “rigid form,” against which untrammeled emotion strains, that makes real sonnets so thrilling to read. These are just 14-line poems that read like the work of pretty much every American poet these days in their unimaginative flatness. Calling them “sonnets” is like calling a badger a horse because they both have four legs.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous poems. The kind that make you read them twice and then aloud a couple of times. This is a keeper. When I am finished with a book of poetry, I’ll leave it in spot that someone else might pick it up.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What one wants, to be a person who fully loves, / seems so focused and pure." ("Hymn")

[Alex Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

While some of the poems leave a lot to be desired for me, Cole’s unique and raw style brings words to life with emotion rather than stiff construction.

[Tristen Durocher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Louise Gluck reviewed it, that’s why I read it. He had his moments. But not every poem carried a visceral impact.

[Rodney Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moxie. I have stayed away from him for years. My bad luck.
Really great variety, serene and heartbreaking. Funny, delicious (really?)

[Ot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really my thing. On occasion a sonnet I quite liked. The rest were a little weird and stuff.

[William Zhuang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give everything to be able to write like him one day. The simplicity of these poems’ form only amplifies how he possesses language and images.

[Lyanne Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Legendary thus far. So so beautiful. Can't wait to read them all.

Update: first half was just incredible, but I felt his more recent sonnets were weaker….