Riding High

Reading a selected poems is a little like taking part in one of those guided walking tours that my in-laws often enjoyed. If you already know the location well, there’s interest in seeing which parts the guide will highlight. If the terrain is new, then you get curated memories, a certain signposted path through other people’s lives and glimpses of a more panoramic history. You’ll feel more confident in going off and exploring on your own another time.

A Selected that highlights only one form a poet has worked in is even more intriguing: it’s a chance to see how the writer grew into that form or changed because of its restrictions, the way a long-cherished garment might chart the changes of the body in how it fits, how it hangs, how it fades. Presiding images or ideas sing through too. In the case of Henri Cole’s Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), the white horse depicted in blurred motion on the book's cover canters through many of the poems, sometimes as a passing ghost, sometimes as a central metaphor or image, sometimes as its literal self. In the book’s eponymous poem, a horse “whipped by a man” suggests a symbiotic transference of energy: “I want the force / of attraction to crush the force of repulsion / and my inner and outer worlds to pierce / one another, like a horse whipped by a man.”

Such visceral, physical imagery should come as no surprise. In a 2014 interview with the Paris Review, Cole speaks of the notion that "like a body with bone and flesh a poem needs different densities.” In a formal poem such as a sonnet, in which restriction and freedom are in constant tension, perhaps the poet has to pay more attention to these densities. The Poetry Foundation’s biographical note about Cole puts it slightly differently: Cole's poems contain “language that both chafes against and sings toward its source in the body.” Throughout his poems, that body pulls away and then draws back toward itself and the bodies of others; that singing toward and chafing against manifests in the poem’s varying registers, the different densities of tone with which Cole imbues his sonnets. For all the tightness and rigidity the sonnet form sometimes suggests, he is remarkable for how he lets in the light.

Cole expands on this idea in the book’s eloquent and informative afterword:

The sonnet—with its infrastructure of highs and lows, with its volta and the idea of transformation, with its asymmetry of lines like the foliage of a tree growing above a trunk, and with its mix of passion and thought—seemed to me about perfect.

“About perfect” is an important coda here. Cole's liberal interpretation of the sonnet ("I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn't mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines") is perhaps what allows him to be so dextrous at the form, taking pleasure in the hard craft ("pleasure comes from … assembling language into art") while also feeling that it "frees him" to be both "dignified and bold."

These poems never feel smug and don't strive toward perfection for perfection's sake—by which I mean these sonnets don’t let formal restriction inhibit the flow of emotion and heart. Perhaps the sonnets themselves are the best testament to this.

***

In Gravity and Center, Cole excerpts his work chronologically, beginning with The Visible Man (1998), continuing through four subsequent collections, and ending with eight new sonnets. A couple of early examples deviate from the single block stanza he later preferred. “Arte Povera” could perhaps be taken as a manifesto: “In the limestone fountain lay lizards / and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source […] Nearby, a gas-light shone its white-hot tongue, / a baby spat up — the stomach’s truthtelling.”

Drawing on Arte Povera, an avant-garde movement that began in Italy in the late 1960s, in which “everyday” or unconventional materials were used in art, partly to disrupt or question the financial systems of the art world, Cole gives readers those “highs and lows” he mentioned in the book’s afterword, as well as the mix of registers: the everyday meets the profound. The ghost of iambic pentameter sometimes arrives before floating away, disturbed by an extra foot or an extra syllable. Each time the metric cage feels as though it’s on the edge of being locked tight, Cole pries open the bars a little. In “Adam Dying,” he puts daylight between the octave and sestet with a stanza break, yet it’s in the unbroken body of “Peonies,” signalling the formal construction Cole favored moving forward, where the most accomplished lines appear. The poem closes with an astonishing sestet:

and, deeper in, tight little buds that seem to blush
from the pleasure they take in being submissive,
because absolute humility in the face of cruelty
is the Passive’s way of becoming himself;
the groan of it all, like a penetrated body –
those of us who hear it know the feeling.

Cole has suggested that early in his career he “used nature as a mask for writing about private feelings,” though that’s not what’s happening here. The peonies, perhaps in a panpsychist sense, draw Cole toward the erotic, with the near-simultaneity of the “penetrated body” and the groan triggering the memory of a feeling. The lines evoke something intensely sensual but perhaps also slightly distant. That push and pull again, both toward and away from.

As Cole shifts into the preferred block form for his stanzas, he loses none of the movement that more experimental lineation gave him in earlier poems. Consider the final few lines of “Icarus Breathing,” from Middle Earth (2003):

A big wave makes my feet slither. I feel like a baby,
bodiless and strange: a man is nothing if he is not changing.
Father, is that you breathing? Forgiveness is anathema to me.
I apologise. Knock me to the floor. Take me with you.

The mix of the metrically long line and the frequent caesura gives this verse an undulating effect, its final cry calling out beyond its own confines. In “Landscape with Deer and Figure,” Cole writes, “If you listen, you can hear them chewing / before you see them standing or sitting”—that notion of sound before sight, of hearing the musicality of a poem before seeing its formal structure, is key to much of Cole’s project.

Swans, those perennial poetry staples, turn up in Middle Earth in a poem that furthers Cole’s mission of reading the physical body through the natural world or framing the natural world as a portal to speak toward longing or yearning. In “Swans,” humans, in this case mourners, are at first separate from nature and then considered together: “where we stood soberly watching the ash float / or acquiesce and the swans, mooring themselves / against the little scrolls churned up out of the grave.” The speaker becomes “like an umbrella in sand” while the wind is “flashing its needles / in air, the surf heavy, nebulous,” and he remembers “a sunburned boy napping between hairy legs.” Here we see the separation of the human and the natural (together perhaps only in death) that then allows the poem to pivot toward the frisson of the final physical image: “yellow jackets hovering over an empty basket.”

A later poem, “To a Snail,” from Blizzard (2020), seems to be in conversation with Thom Gunn’s “Considering the Snail,” first published in My Sad Captains (1961). The latter’s speaker holds back from personal involvement; Cole’s is more willing to intercede: “so I’ve relocated you to the woods.” Cole, then, is a poet who doesn’t just observe but also gets involved. Gunn’s beautiful questioning of the snail’s “fury,” his consideration of its “slow passion” to its “deliberate progress,” becomes in Cole a more direct extrapolation to the human condition with this statement: “It’s a long game — / the whole undignified, insane attempt at living.” The contrast between undignified and the regal elements of Gunn’s interpretation fizzes off the page like sudden summer rain.

Alongside Gunn, other poets are also part of the collection’s conversation. The bold first line of “Eating the Peach”—“Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer”—is a riposte to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “On Pride” riffs on Apollinaire, and “Icarus Breathing” alludes to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts," though here the central Brueghel painting is replaced by a “Hokusai print.”

“Each sonnet is a plot against the sonnet,” Gunn wrote, and indeed, every sonneteer perhaps needs a central question to wrestle with, preferably one that’s inherently and ultimately unresolvable. Shakespeare was preoccupied with time above all else, with even the strict metrical walls of the sonnet unable to stop its merciless flow. More recently, Terrance Hayes has wrestled with the Black American body within the wider body politic, and Hannah Lowe has grappled with the impact of empire and class on new generations of Londoners. These brilliant sonneteers know that the sonnet can’t be a site of resolution; it doesn’t offer an answer but rather builds the boundaries in which these ideas can be let loose.

Cole wrestles with the place of the self within the natural world, with the pull and torment between the individual and a desired physical body. The sonnet threatens to reconcile the two but is never quite able to in the way a rigidly formal, traditional sonnet might force this reconciliation. The form, in Cole’s construction, offers a chance for thought not to be resolved but simply to be:

I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed —
though the failure is not in the other,
but in me because I am tired, hurt, or bitter
                                                                        (from “Kayaks”)

I’ve focused on form here because that’s what a selection such as Cole’s almost dares readers to do. It’s worth saying, though, that they shouldn’t lose sight of the poems themselves—that is, not sacrifice the content for its packaging. There is such beautiful, searing work in this collection, about same-sex desire, about the physical body, beautifully distilled descriptions of nature. The sonnet is the cooking process and the plating, but readers shouldn’t overlook the flavors as well.

***

“The tragic situation of the individual in the world” is the grand phrase Cole lands on in his afterword, bringing the whole collection to a close. What is that situation? To fear solitude and yet find connection to be fleeting or impossible: “Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness, / as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,” he wrote in “American Kestrel.” “Oil & Steel,” a poem about Cole’s father, ends “this man who never showed / me much affection but gave me a knack / for solitude, which has been mostly useful”—a line that speaks to that push and pull as well as any in the collection. Perhaps it’s why Cole feels continually pulled back to the image of the horse, its beauty and practicality, its surreal otherworldliness and its everyday presence.

“Sometimes,” Cole told The Paris Review, “the poem takes on a life of its own, and I must yield to it, like a rider on a cantering pony.” (That equine companion again.) “Sow with Piglets,” the book’s final poem—a new one—closes “with muddy sneakers and thick torso, / I feel saner in this place. I’ve paid my price / and am here for the duration.” It recalls his earlier rallying cry for “Mud and life, water and hope — / I want them all, really,” in “Migraine.” Cole is at home in the sonnet form, never yielding to it but locked in the push and pull of restriction and freedom, of solitude and companionship. The tragic situation of the individual in the world may never be resolved, but it can be held, like a brief glancing together of hands, within the flesh of the sonnet.