The Visible Man: Poems Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy The Visible Man: Poems? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Visible Man: Poems. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Visible Man: Poems Review[This book brief appeared March 11, 1999, in Seattle's "The Stranger" and can be found online at http://www.thestranger.com/1999-03-11/books2.html]
Cole does to the sonnet what postmodern consciousness does to the self--he wrenches it, shatters it, sucks it dry, turns it inside out, and sometimes, for a moment, holds it in a quiet embrace. The central problem of his book is knowledge, which made Apollo a god but divides us from ourselves. Cole seeks to unite body and mind in a self through Arte Povera poems - rough, impromptu works "in motion, / stroking toward what [he] cannot see" ('Apollo'). But the self proves to be neither a temple for the spirit nor a sturdy Greek column, and Cole becomes a tourist and connoisseur of his own disintegration -- he is marble rubble, broken stanzas, stray glimpses of porn flicks, bouts of loveless fellatio under the pier. The poet is a Visible Man in what he calls an "erotic x-ray of my soul" ('Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting').
Though Cole refuses to flatter us with sweetness, he can be very funny, mingling exquisitely precise imagery with comic observation. Ancient crumbling statues resemble "bodies sinking in quicksand," but "a luckless prick / is frozen in the stucco." Scholars "eat big bowls of pasta / and drain their preposterous bowels" ('The Scholars'). Many passages are marvelous - history has "white teeth / jammed with gristle" ('The Black Jacket'); forgiveness is "so hard to swallow it unshackles us" ('26 Hands'); a house is "illuminated all night, / like the unconscious, though no one enters" ('The Coastguard Station').
Cole is determined "To write what is human, not escapist." He makes himself "at home with evil, with unexamined feelings, / with just the facts" ('Apollo'), and welcomes the "Stranger, with genitalia greased," crooning, "Come, unlace my boots; I chose you" ('Etna'). Here the nervous system is, for better or worse, the organ of the mind.The Visible Man: Poems Overview

Want to learn more information about The Visible Man: Poems?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now