Nora Delaney on Henri Cole
It is in the later poems that Cole takes the greater risks as a poet; poems which are also his most successful. They attempt to capture fully internal thought, almost pre-cognition – ideas and feelings that exist in the individual before language enters the picture. These poems are dynamic rather than photo-static, and they are ultimately more revealing – and more moving – than his earlier poems. No matter how precisely Cole’s early books paint childhood vignettes of the boy and his mother watching soldiers, or the boy snooping through his father’s jewelry, these works do not grapple with emotion and intellect as successfully as the more daring self-portraits in Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf.