As with all received forms, there is no such thing as a sonnet, either as Platonic ideal to be imagined or as concrete template to be pointed at. What there are are many, many examples of sonnets, examples which—if we limit ourselves to English alone—cleave to a greater or lesser extent to certain constraints, formal (fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, pre-set rhyme schemes) and/or conceptual (argument and volta, problem and solution, even set-up and punchline). This forever-growing store demonstrates, of course, historical change and development, but also—perhaps more revealingly—nuances of individual style and approach. A sonnet by Wordsworth is not like a sonnet by Milton, one by Gerard Manly Hopkins is not like one by Robert Lowell. This new book, collecting poems written between 1994 and 2022, makes a powerful case that Henri Cole is having a similar, personal, decisive impact on the form.
In a bold move, Gravity and Center leaps over Cole’s first three volumes, each of which could have provided more conventional examples, to open with the radical, urgent palinode “Arte Povera”, the first poem in 1998’s The Visible Man:
In the little garden of Villa Sciarra,
I found a decade of poetry dead.
In the limestone fountain lay lizards
and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source.
This directness of both diction and message, overtaking convention, would become the norm in Cole’s work. Despite its pivotal place in his development, The Visible Man actually gets short shrift in this new selected: neither the marvelous “Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting” nor anything from the innovative, immersive sequence “Apollo” makes the cut. What this fast-forward does enable is a swift transition to the poems of Middle Earth (2004), where the shift promised in the earlier volume really bore fruit. Cole rightfully focusses on this period in his afterword:
I chose to write free verse sonnets in plain speech and to bring to them some of the characteristics of Japanese poetry: the Buddhist notion of dealing less with conceptualized thoughts than with states of mind and feeling, a sense of social responsibility, a valuing of sincerity over artifice, the use of images as emblems for inner states, and a preoccupation with themes of love.
Capturing this paradoxical—to a Western consciousness, perhaps—union of “mind” and “feeling” (especially if we consider “feeling” as covering a range from emotional reaction through to bodily sensation) now becomes the goal of Cole’s work, and makes the sonnet, with its “infrastructure of highs and lows,” its “mix of passion and thought,” made up of “little fractures and leaps and resolutions,” the ideal vessel to hold such apparent contradictions in suspension:
no one animal his own,
as I am my own, watching them watch me,
feeling a fever mount in my forehead,
where all that I am is borne and is effaced
by a herd of deer gathered in the meadow—
like brown ink splashed on rice paper—
abstract, exalted, revealing the eternal harmony,
for only five or six moments, of obligation to family
manifested with such frightful clarity and beauty
it quells the blur of human feeling.
This “blur of human feeling,” reconfiguring and reduction of the ego, occurs in numerous ways in Cole’s sonnets. Though they frequently draw on personal experience, they rarely feel autobiographical in a confessional mode. Instead, they tend to be more concerned with the extent to which a particular moment or encounter can be made exemplary, allowed to flower into allegory, the burden of the “I” to some extent pushed aside.
One manifestation of this approach is the fleeting presence in many of these poems of striking declarative claims, presented not so much as definitive axioms, or parts of a systematic philosophy, than as possibilities worth trying out or on: “the mind replays / what nurtures it,” “a man is nothing if he is not changing,” “[t]he world is nothing but the scraping of a donkey,” “[n]o one is truly the owner of his own instincts, / but controlling them—this is civilization.” This embrace of a strangely fluid, temporary certainty gives the individual poems their kick and intensity: “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.” The sonnet form is thus enabler, a container that, even without the conventions of rhyme and meter, has a shapeliness and brevity that permits the meeting of the seemingly incompatible, thinker and temperament:
In my bed, in a pocket notebook, I made
a drawing, then cried, “Wake up, Dragonfly.
Don’t die!” I was sitting half-naked
in the humidity, my pen in my hot palm.
I was smiling at Dragonfly, but getting angry.
So I put him in a rice bowl, with some melon
and swept-up corpses of mosquitos,
where he shone like a big broken earring,
his terrified eyes gleaming like little suns,
making me exhausted, lonely like that,
before sleep, waiting to show my drawing.
The petulance and childishness of this confrontation with mortality is so much more provoking and resonant than a more somber, mature reflection would be; the need for some form of unattainable “adult” (divine?) acknowledgement and attention in the face of death and the limits of the aesthetic that much more affecting. This tonal flexibility, shifting from perspective to perspective, may explain something of Cole’s deep openness to otherness in the world: many of the poems collected here address and investigate animals and plants—especially flowers—not as mere objects of attention, but as profoundly alternate modes of existence. Cole is thus forever testing Stevens’ key questions, “how to live” and “what to do.”
Another related possibility offered by the sonnet that Cole is oddly reticent about in his comments on the form (maybe it hits too close to home?) is its ongoingness. The closed nature of the individual sonnet, its very completion, seems to invite the creation of another one, the “next” one: the sonnet sequence is as old, after all, as the form itself. While Cole doesn’t present his sonnets in a self-consciously continuous manner—Gravity and Center is not some updated attempt at Lowell’s Notebook and its subsequent refashionings—the book can’t quite escape the paradoxical-seeming tension between discrete poem and rounded collection—in this case, a collection of collections. Recognizing this unceasing dialectic clarifies why this book feels so dynamic, something that seems ready—despite its individual poems’ many specific pauses and epiphanies—to explode (the very opposite of quietude). While it is not the case that all of Cole’s best poems are sonnets, enough are to make this selection a more-than-cogent project; Pierce the Skin, a more conventional selected, came out back in 2010, yet I would argue that this new selection provides a more incisive ‘portrait of the artist’: restless, proud, metamorphic, braving a seemingly necessary solitude. The eight new sonnets included show an engagement, appropriately enough, still very much in process, ongoing and unfinished. For Cole, even a simple trip to the supermarket can prompt both crisis and revelation:
None of us knows what to expect out there.
Surely pain is to be part of it
and the unwelcome intrusion of the past,st
like violent weather that makes a grim chiaroscuro
of the air before a curtain of rainwater falls.
I clutch my basket and push on.
Rob Stanton is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) and Journeys (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2022). His reviews have featured in Canadian Literature, Jacket 2, Restless Messengers and Tripwire, among other places.