Touch

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.