Peter Cole: What is Doubled – Poems 1981-1998
Published October 2005
Paperback, 212pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562795
This volume gathers between a single set of covers the two highly-praised books of poems published by Peter Cole in the United States — Rift and Hymns & Qualms. The doubling of its title, however, runs deeper, and reflects Cole's long engagement with the cultures of Jerusalem and linkage at every level. Whether a poem takes up the patterns of bird flight, the Eros of speech, or the slaughter of Muslim worshippers by a Jewish settler in Hebron, the poet's concern throughout has been with forms of offering and strategies of sustenance. What is Doubled "envelops light as it conveys light" (Bradford Morrow), and introduces readers to what American poet David Shapiro has called "a startling synthesis of the poetry of wisdom and the freshest music."
In addition to his two collections of poems, Peter Cole has published many volumes of translations from medieval and contemporary Hebrew and Arabic. Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including a TLS Translation Prize, the PEN-America Translation Award, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Born and raised in the United States, he now lives in Jerusalem, where he co-edits Ibis Editions.
Praise for Peter Cole's work includes the following:
"[Rift is] one for all of you who thought modern poetry could not be
both profound and beautiful at the same time. For me this is the epitome
of modern lyric. [Hymns & Qualms is] the poet's second collection, and
another masterpiece . . . Whatever the form, one thread flows through the
whole: a master's control of the language."
—Tony Frazer, Shearsman
"The keenness of his mind and the moral seriousness of his work astonish
. . . The exquisite specificity of his diction and the intricacy of his prosody
are without parallel among the poets of his — and my — generation."
—Forrest Gander
"An urban poet whose city is Jerusalem; a classicist whose Antiquity
is medieval Hebrew; a sensualist whose objects of delight are Mediterranean;
an avant-gardist whose forms are the meditation, the song, the jeremiad,
the proverb: Late in the story, American modernism has invented a Jewish
poet who is more than tangentially Jewish, and one whose affinities are older
than the Yiddish immigrant traditions. This is not a varnish of local color,
but an unexpected opening: a new archaic bringing a new 'deep song'."
—Eliot Weinberger
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