The Visible Man - Hardcover

Cole, Henri

 
9780375403965: The Visible Man
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375403965 ISBN 13: 9780375403965
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Poems reveal an unsentimental view of the curiosities and wonders surrounding the end of the twentieth century

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henri Cole is Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He is the author of three earlier books of poems, for which he has received many awards, including the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was executive director of the Academy of American Poets from 1982 to 1988, and he has since taught at Columbia University, Reed College, Yale University, and the University of Maryland.

Aus dem Klappentext

arold Bloom and many other critics and poets for his earlier collections, Henri Cole has grown steadily in poetic stature and importance. "To write what is human, not escapist," is his endeavor. Now he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book.<br><br>On being awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Henri Cole received the following citation:<br><br>"In a poetry nervously alive to the maladies of the contemporary, yet suffused by a rare apprehension of the delights of the senses, Henri Cole has relished the world while being unafraid to satirize it. In poems that are both decorative and plain-spoken he permits his readers to share a keen and unsentimental view of the oddities, horrors, and solaces surrounding them at the end of the twentieth centu

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Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting

First Style

To become oneself is so exhausting
that I am as others have made me,
imitating monumental Greek statuary
despite my own feminized way of being.
Like the empire, I was born of pain--
or like a boy, one might say, for I have
become my father, whom I cannot fathom;
the past is a fetish I disdain.
Since they found the bloodless little girl,
with voluptuous lips, buried in me,
I am unsentimental. I do not see
the gold sky at sunset but blackbirds hurled
like lava stones. I am like a severed
finger lost in the wreckage forever.


Second Style

Unable to care for people, I care
mostly for things. At my bitterest,
I see love as self-censorship.
My face is a little Roman theater
in perfect perspective--with colonnades
and landscapes--making illusionistic
reference to feelings I cannot admit.
Painted in Dionysiac yellows and reds,
my unconscious is a rocky grotto
where flies buzz like formalists.
Despite myself, I am not a composite
of signs to be deciphered. In the ghetto--
where Jews, prostitutes and sailors once lived--
I am happiest because I am undisguised.


Third Syle

Tearing away at an old self to make
a new one, I am my most Augustan.
I grieve little. I try to accustom
myself to what is un--Hellenized and chaste.
I let my flat black dado assert
itself without ornament. Can it be, at last,
that I am I--accepting lice clasped
to me like a dirty Colosseum cat?
On a faded panel of Pompeian red,
there's an erotic x-ray of my soul:
a pale boy-girl figure is unconsoled,
pinned from behind at the farthest edge
of human love, where the conscience is not whole,
yet finely engraved like a snail's shell.


Fourth Style

If great rooms declare themselves by the life
lived in them, each night I am reborn
as men and boys stroll among the ruins,
anonymously skirting the floodlights,
sinking into me tenderly, as they do
each other during their brief hungry acts.
"As brief as love," they used to say, Plato
and his kind, exiling man from happiness,
but I am more than a cave whose campfire,
swelling and contracting, is all that is real.
Tomorrow, when I am drunk on sunlight,
I will still feel the furtive glances,
the unchaste kisses and the wet skin
imprinting me until I am born again.

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375403965
ISBN 13 
9780375403965
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
67
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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