Works by
Henri Cole
(Poet)
[1956 - ]

• Blackbird and Wolf (2007)
  In his sixth collection of poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. “I don’t want words to sever me from reality,” he asserts, and these poems—often hovering within the realm of the sonnet—combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother’s body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in Blackbird and Wolf, he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

• The Visible Man (1998)
  Praised by Harold 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.

• Middle Earth (1998) -- Co-winner, 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry

• The Look of Things (1995)
  One of the many voices to praise this book, Wayne Koestenbaum has siad in The New Yorker that "Cole can approach a variety of subjects, from first love to cabbage butterflies, from a wedding announcement in the Times to a family shocked by a son's homosexuality. . . . Commanding a full range of idioms, he assembles poems of a sculptural fineness."

• The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989)

• The Marble Queen (1986)

See also:

• Jenny Holzer: Truth Before Power (2004), by Maurice Berger, ed. with Eckhard Schneider, Henri Cole, Jenny Holzer, and Peter Glotz
  The politics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is the subject of Truth Before Power, Jenny Holzer's recent Kunsthaus Bregenz project. The complicated dialectic of decision-making and public debate, as it has unfolded through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush, is explored in texts devoted to such issues as the international trade in arms and oil, the war on terrorism, 9/11, the FBI and CIA, and Congress's oversight of the intelligence community. For the most part, the installation's text has been taken verbatim from U.S. government documents--many of which were classified at the time they were written. Under the landmark Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966, all are now public record, though some remain heavily redacted. This illustrated catalogue includes selections from declassified U.S. government documents, Henri Cole's poem To the Forty-third President, and highlights from Holzer's own writing. Color photographs document Holzer's installations at the Kunsthaus and the Johanniterkirche in Feldkirch, and the eight xenon light projections staged in Vorarlberg.