If the lyrical mode of the poems in Henri Cole’s Blizzard is something “elegant, libidinous, austere”—as one poem characterizes Cole’s own personality—the great subject to which Cole returns is desire itself, the desire that directs our actions and libidos, that guides all of life, separating those who act and are actionable, the truly alive, from those who exist in the futile compulsions that end in decay and death. He may think that desire becomes “coffin liquor,” as “To the Oversoul” puts it, but he persists in creating an art disabused of illusions and made astringent by the losses of experience. In Blizzard, his tenth collection, the frustrated idealist’s need to write about this living desire is inseparable from the erotic impulse that guides a poet to perfect the work. “I rewrite to be read,” he says in “At the Grave of Robert Lowell,” “though I feel shame acknowledging it.”
The shame arises, in part, from a sense of the tastelessness of worldly ambition, of seeking fame and human connection from an art form that Lowell himself, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, said, “hardly seems to exist.” A straightforward seriousness about one’s desire for posterity would probably garner laughter from the socially distanced audiences seeking solace and meaning at a Zoom poetry reading today. And if the larger desire of which this ambition is a part—the open-hearted, Whitmanian affirmation of the life force—is no longer poetically plausible, what then? Blizzard can be read as a series of answers to such a question, a contrarious flame of artistic strategies that burns with the old desire for veracity and sense—“If I want the truth, I must seek it out”—but does so only indirectly, when the abashed poet looks at the fire askant….
For the rest of the review, see the summer 2021 issue of The Georgia Review.