Middle Earth

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: Cole's fifth poetry collection "examines the dichotomies between life and death, animal and human, and the lover and the beloved" (Library Journal).

"Middle Earth is Henri Cole's epiphany, his Whitmanesque sunrise. . . . Henri Cole has become a master poet, with few peers. . . . A central poet of his generation." ―Harold Bloom

Henri Cole's Middle Earth is a work both erotic and visionary. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of "a man alone," trying "to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence." Cole, who was born in Japan, draws on austere and resonant images from the art and landscape of that country as he investigates creaturely existence. This remarkable poet—who is as given to candor as to passion—has here produced striking poems that hover formally within the aura of the sonnet, where grief and ardor achieve wit and shapeliness. In these pages, uncertainty is boldly outlined and doubt chiseled to finality, as sense and mind, entangled as ever, find powerful and delicate integration.

"This is the most intimate book in American poetry since Plath's Ariel. . . . Henri Cole's new poems, proud and knowing and wounded, archly suspicious, can be revealing because they guard their privacies so well. Middle Earth escapes all the praise I can heap upon it." —William Logan, The New Criterion

"Cole is fated to be a deeply stylish poet, whatever technical tools he picks up or sets down. . . . Readers will find in Cole's latest book, Middle Earth, a lyric reconsecration." ―Maureen N. McLane, The New York Times Book Review