"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In "The Visible Man "he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this [...]
"Time was plunging forward,
"like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
"following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef,
"where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
"and it was as if that was all God wanted:
"not a wife, a house or a position,
"but a self, like [...]
A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published "77 Dream Songs," but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A "spooky" collection in the words of Robert Lowell--"a mad[...]