Simply to thank Anthony for this - I've followed Peter Cole's work for
some time - got _Rift_ and it's great; looking forward to catching this
one. RC
On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Anthony Frazer wrote:
> I have benefitted from some recently-expressed enthusiasms of contributors
> to this list and thought it was time I passed on a new-ish discovery of my
> own.
>
> Peter Cole is an American poet, 40-ish, resident in Jerusalem, and a
> magnificent translator from Hebrew (books by the medieval Shmuel HaNagid
> plus moderns Aharon Shabtai and Harold Schimmel - though I've only seen the
> HaNagid and Shabtai so far).
>
> His second full-length collection <Hymns and Qualms> has just appeared from
> Sheep Meadow Press (PO Box 1345, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY 10471), at $12.95,
> and is one of the finest voumes of new poetry that I've come across
> recently. His first book, <Rift> is unfortunately out of print.
>
> Some excerpts from H&Q (in the first and third, the lines are deliberately
> ragged: I hope they survive translation from my software to yours):
>
>
> Blessings Echo Will Traumatize (poem XVI from the sequence <Speech´s Hedge>
>
>
> My aim at high choirs
> in each maybe arrives
> meshed with hackneyed knickknacks
> or similes
> echoes will traumatize--
> which might be what it means
> to follow out design,
> to take one's cue from feeling
> as it's felt, not filtered,
> or smeared.
>
> The pain of loving you
> is almost more than I can bear,
> said Dowson; not Dowson,
> who was it? (Lawrence--.)
> And yet it has to be borne,
> or else we wilt in painlessness.
> I was loyal to feeling's form
> although it brought me
> negative love, not fame,
> and vintage heartache.
>
> Was I loyal--
> out of shame alone
> or fear? Fiction's coward,
> I was loyal out of love
> which soured
> and has to find a new flame.
>
> I wasn't qualified -- and found it
> where the old had died,
> in ash and air,
> and made of it a choir
>
> for those whom echoes bring.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
>
> Multiplex (Shmuel HaNagid, 11thC)
>
>
> The multiple troubles of man,
> my brother, like slander and pain,
> amaze you? Consider the heart
> which folds them all
> in strangeness and doesn't break.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Perfect Pitch
>
>
> Through thinking come like
> eyes to lie
>
> like clouds
> or ewes
>
> by slopes that face the
> deads' incline
> and unquaint perch
> on resurrection--
> a church-fueled
> geo-religious formation
> conducting dust and meaning
>
> which drained where screams of
> offered innocence settled
>
> and continents abut:
>
> Remember coming to die --
>
> and not to self alone--?
>
> and now alone with trapezoids
> of sky
> and deadened sea
>
> to build a garden waiting
> (walled) or warding off what was
>
> to be a cult of plainness,
> a busy if bladeless altar
>
> of *does* confused with *is*--
> an oasis to funnel
>
> what breaks along
> the rim of it
>
> in algebras of coming,
> composite truth instilled, not preached,
>
> or preened,
>
> but shining,
>
> slope to thinking's slope.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> * indicates an italicised word.
>
>
>
>
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