Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 - Paperback

$23.76
$23.76
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Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022
  • Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022
Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 - Paperback

Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 - Paperback

by Henri Cole
$23.76
$23.76

Book Overview

by Henri Cole (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Number of Pages: 192
Dimensions: 0.45 x 8.25 x 5.38 IN
Publication Date: April 02, 2024
ISBN9780374612832
Author Henri Cole
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedApril 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages192
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Nonfiction Poetry

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About Henri Cole

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight previous collections of poetry and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Touch. He is the poetry editor of The New Republic and lives in Boston, where he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

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