A Review of The Other Love by Henri Cole
The Other Love
by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.
Henri Cole’s 2020 book of poetry, Blizzard, embraces extremities of emotive experience, its speakers’ understanding of the brutalities of the world, and of the Self, owed to the poet’s presentation of an expansive empathy. It takes an impressive awareness of the dynamic interplay between community and individual, perceived subject and perceiving, private voice, to achieve such a production.
The social consciousness responsible for Blizzard, the poet reminds us in this new book of poems, The Other Love, must necessarily continue to develop. From the outset, the empathy of the former book has been metabolized, or shed like a layer of skin, not to reappear in its explicit state any longer:
A gun is
a vengeful machine exacting a price. A gun rejects
stillness. It wants to get off. A man can be vain—
almost like a god—but inside him is a carp biting
the muck of a lake.
In the poem “Guns,” the speaker’s acquaintance Yosi has been shot. Though the speaker admits he is “desolate” when confronted with the facts of Yosi’s death, the poem itself is contemplative, even-handed, and matter-of-fact, like in the description of Yosi, the man who “ground my meat in Hingham,” and whose “shiny pink / meat truck is for sale” and who, by the poem’s end, lies “with a gold cloth on his face,” “[s]elf-reliant, autonomous, tough…in a shroud of silk.” Though Cole’s style, spare and precise, has remained consistent, one could hardly imagine this poem appearing in Blizzard. Looking at the patterns of this writing might reveal the motives and rhetorical goals of The Other Love.
“Guns” exemplifies The Other Love’s language, one of description and acceptance, of essences and things-as-they-are. In a string of aphoristic sentences, we learn a gun is “a vengeful machine” that “rejects stillness” and “wants to get off”; inside of a vain man is an image of natural harmlessness: “a carp biting / the muck of a lake.” Within the inert gun and the equally inert Yosi reside essences only to be accepted by our speaker: a gun rejects stillness; Yosi is self-reliant, autonomous, tough, despite no longer being alive.
Suffering, which is now far too ethereal, has entered the realm of bad dreams—to be found in another poem, by another poet, or perhaps in a previous iteration of Henri Cole. In this book, suffering takes place in the background, too extreme to be lingered over with any seriousness by speakers determined to live a Dharmic middle path. In “Horace,” Cole allows his speaker to reach an acceptance of suffering right outside the frame of the poem, and thus to watch, distant and controlled, the otherwise distressing scenes. While remembering his “grandfather’s softness / whilst hugging him when I was a little boy,” the speaker sustains the subjunctive mood:
It was as if God hadn’t created us naked
or defenseless and we had all we wanted.
It was as if wilderness would never cease to be.
It was as if we needn’t attend to it or die.
Unlike the rat in good Horace, I am content
with my lot.
The poem asks us to imagine an ideal world in which the grandfather is still alive, in which our collective action against nature doesn’t threaten our very existence. Yet despite the clear fact that none of those things are true—grandfathers die and we continue to pollute and deforest—the speaker is “content with my lot,” and though “[w]e live in such tragic times, / buffeted like stone more than flesh,” the poem ends with the drama of continuance: “Yet each day the fulgent sun rises / and blackbirds gather on the wire.”
The second section of the book, which focuses more specifically on identity, often elides personal suffering, or treats it as any other mundane fact. A potentially harrowing event in “Célibataire” mingles with disjointed description and memory—the speaker remembers in childhood “doing cartwheels as father cut the grass” equally as well as a lightning strike burning “a hole through my bedroom screen,” the quick juxtaposition of the lines conflating the two events, so that when we reach the end, the speaker’s anxiousness at his mother, the probable eponymous célibataire, asking “‘Are you my son, dear,/ or my husband?’” seems to idle, as the speaker does, into “part of the scenery.”
The ethos of this book is most explicit in the poem “Fungus Day”: it is a product, and the dramatization, of survival. Engaging in the ritual of the everyday, of accepting the plain facts of existence as they are allows resilience to rise from an acknowledgement that those plain facts themselves will persist. Cleaning an aquarium, scrubbing “a little plastic palm tree with your toothbrush,” gives way to increasingly pertinent revelations, until “[y]ou lift up your eyes and hear a voice saying, / ‘Your life has changed’.” “The how, where, when you question not” just as in the poems of this book description and acceptance are prioritized, “because of a quiet strength.” When one accepts that “[t]his is life as it is now,” says “[f]arewell to embellishments,” and “[t]hrows away metaphor,” what remains is “the self, visibly present, almost element, / traversing an edge to grapple rock,” persevering on a perilous cliff just as fungus adheres to earth.
