Cheap Middle Earth: Poems (Book) (Henri Cole) Price

CHEAP-PRICE.NET's Cheap Price: $15.64

Here at Cheap-price.net we have Middle Earth: Poems at a terrific price. The real time price may actually be cheaper- click on the 'Buy Now' above to check the realtime price of Middle Earth: Poems at Amazon.com.

AUTHOR: Henri Cole

CATEGORY: Book

MANUFACTURER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 0374208816

TYPE: American - General, American Contemporary Poetry, Poetry, Single Author, Poetry / General

MEDIA: Hardcover

# OF MEDIA: 1

Related Products:

Customer Review of Middle Earth: Poems
A fine book
I disagree with the last two reviewers. I think that Henri Cole is at the height of his maturity as a poet. He navigates through the variations of the sonnet with ease; and there are surprises and compressed intricacies in every poem. MIDDLE EARTH is a fine book.

Dishonest and Repetitive
I enjoyed Cole's last book but dislike this one. Though Cole aims for a certain kind of truth, the self-hating in this book becomes a mere self-indulgence in poem after poem. Cole tries to elicit the reader's sympathy under the pretense of writing nakedly; instead, Cole simply has settled into a repetitive style. Cole tries to walk "on an edge," to fuse his metaphors into "one crystalline rock," but his self-indulgent, myopic posturing leaves one cold, "like ice in a champagne bucket."

Whatever it may be, it's not poetry.
Henri Cole, Middle Earth (FSG, 2003)

First off, let's get this out of the way: this book has no ties whatever to Tolkein.

That said, it was the first proof I've ever had of an urban legend I've been hunting down for years. Skim through the Poet's Market sometims and look at the descriptions of the things magazine editors don't want. Most of them come down to one basic description said in a thousand ways: "pointless academic tripe." A few have, in the past, named names, but the names most often named I never thought of as all that pointless, some of them downright enjoyable. (But then, I'm an imagist, and from my POV the image is its own point in any decent poem.) Most of the "tell, don't show" poems, which are the very definition of pointless, don't fit the academic part of the puzzle.

Then I discovered the work of Henri Cole, and for the first time, I understood what all those editors are on about.

Archibald MacLeish once wrote that "a poem should not mean, but be." Cole, on the other hand, wants desperately to invest every word with meaning (instead of letting the words invest themselves with meaning, as any good poem does), and while in some existentialist sense they do achieve being, there is no life behind them.

The main problem here is that it seems Henri Cole has never met an image he liked. He's too busy floundering around in the world of vagueness to give the reader anything to latch onto, resulting in tortured lines like "Heart, unquiet thing/I don't want to hate any more. I want love/to trample through my arms again." ("My Tea Ceremony") It's not like we haven't read the same thing from a hundred thousand high-school-age teen-angst poets. Or the painful thud of perhaps the collection's worst line, "Tears represent how much my mother loves me" ("Self-Portrait in a Gold Kimono"). It would barely fly in a James Joyce novel; there is nothing at all poetic about it. * ½

Skin Care

Plus Size Clothing

Vitamins

Contact Lenses

Massage Chairs

Gardening

Gourmet Food

Sports Apparel

Lingerie/Bras/Panties

DVD

Loose Stones

Musical Instruments

Baby Product

Downloadable Software

Drugstore

Home

Lawn & Patio

Luggage

Single Detail Page Misc

Video

Video Games

Apparel

Furniture

Home Improvement

Pet Products

Toy

Wireless

Audible

Automotive Parts and Accessories

Beauty

Book

Ebook

Electronics

Food and Beverage

Gift Certificates

Gourmet

Jewelry

Kitchen

Magazine

Music

Office Product

Paper Catalog

Personal Computer

Software

Sports

Watch