Blackbird and Wolf Offers Intimate Look into Mind of a Poet

Henri Cole describes his own poetry as astringent. His words are stark and piercing—he writes that his forceful style helps him to “persevere each day at my writing table, where I must confront myself, overcome any fear of what I might find there.” Blackbird and Wolf, Cole’s most recent collection of poems, is a confrontation of his own inner demons. He explores his mother’s illness, his father’s abuse, his homosexuality, and his hesitant faith in God—all in language that seizes the senses and perforates the emotions.

Cole received his M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia in 1982. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2003’s Middle Earth, he is the author of seven poetry collections. All are confessional and deeply private, yet somehow Cole still welcomes the reader into his home—even though his skeletons are out of the closet and sitting in plain view.

Blackbird and Wolf is split into three parts. The first, entitled “Birthday,” is the most blatantly autobiographical, beginning with an account of Cole’s own delivery: “I came from a place with a hole in it, / my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.” Of the 14 poems in “Birthday,” one in particular stands out for both its indifferent tone and its emotional intensity. In “Oil and Steel,” Cole describes his father, who “lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, / watching a portable black-and-white television, / reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, / which he preferred to Modern Fiction.” In the last few lines, he reveals the ambivalence and self-loathing that surround memories of his father, a “man who never showed / me much affection but gave me a knack / for solitude, which has been mostly useful.”

“Gravity and Center,” the second part of the collection, is less personalized and more metaphorical, incorporating Cole’s Christian faith. In “Embers,” Cole likens his feeling of isolation to that of God: “God held His arms / out to say that He was lonely and that / He was making himself a man.” Here Cole’s words take on universal import, reaching out to God and the cosmos. While these poems are sensual and delicate, “Gravity and Center” lacks the willingness of “Birthday” to bare Cole’s raw emotional wounds. “Gravity and Center” is hardly a misstep on Cole’s part, but the reader does miss the straightforward tenderness of the earlier poems.

Each section of Blackbird and Wolf addresses a different scale: “Birthday” functions on the personal level, “Gravity and Center” on the cosmological, and the last section, “Dune,” on the natural. “Dune’s” poems are entitled “Eating the Peach,” “Dead Wren,” “Bees,” “Persimmon Tree”—each provides a snapshot of some natural image and infuses it with vibrancy. In the final poem, also called “Dune,” Cole reflects on his own writing: “I want to write something highly controlled / that is the opposite, like a dizzy / honeycomb gleaming with amber light.” He succeeds with Blackbird and Wolf—his poems contain an emotional frenzy behind a restrained style. Cole expertly conveys anxiety and chaos through carefully crafted words.