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Things on Which I've Stumbled "Peter Cole is a true maker. His extraordinary learning is deep and personal, and his poems, like his translations, are powered by a large spiritual quest to link and light the world with words. He stands with amazement before great mysteries." Edward Hirsch "[A] major new book.... The title-poem is a tour de-force.... Readers searching for wholly modern poetry dealing with spiritual issues, grounded in history, and presented with great craft will find it in Cole's new book." ForeWord Magazine "Prosodic mastery fuses with a keen moral intelligence in this collection. In his unabashed search for wisdom and beauty – notions many poets today find fatuous or at least too subjective to handle – Cole fearlessly manipulates sonic and semantic patterns.... Working from ancient sources, he has enacted Pound's dictum to 'Make it new.'" American Poet "[Cole's] poetry is ... remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless." Ben Lerner, Bomb Magazine "Erudite, politically charged, and often dazzling." Philip Metres, Gently Read Literature "[Cole's] blend of formalism, Hebraicism, poetic midrash, and Modernist collage is marvelous." Poetry Magazine "A poet of great insight and power." Dustin Kurtz, McNally-Jackson Books "Peter Cole is not a household name, but this MacArthur Fellow has had a long and impressive career as a poet.... There is a quiet, streaming power in Cole's work that leads the reader back to it over and over again." The Bloomsbury Review |
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What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998 "The keenness of his mind and the moral seriousness of his work astonish. To my thinking, 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 "Rift [is] a collection of planar asperities inscribed on the ground-zero of Judaism. [Its] vast lexical spires and belltowers rang with a music new to American poetry – equal parts Louis Zukofsky, August Roebling and something else entirely.... Grounded in Cole's immersion in medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetics, the poems [of Hymns & Qualms] have a newly relaxed amplitude, sounding within a wider range of variation. In the beautiful opening sequence, short canto-like lyrics climb upwards along a fifty-page armature, seamlessly conflating background and foreground, commentary and invocation, and producing a charmed relativity in the head of the reader." Conjunctions |
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Hymns & Qualms "The combination of observation, reverence, and wit... makes Cole an engaging poet.... Dazzling and sober, spare and moving." Chicago Review "While Cole's imagination roams freely and... glosses upon traditional English poetry and its musics, the book's primary setting is Jerusalem and its imagination is nourished by rabbinic Judaism.... Hymns & Qualms works in an exquisite tension between lyricism and elliptical intelligence." Poetry Flash (US) "In these new poems Peter Cole invents his own modern medievalism – a playful sensuality implicating always the persistent tradition of law and legend. His collages and constructivist humor are necessary and large. He has mastered a clear line but can also give us a ferocious deposition against fanaticism. With Hymns & Qualms he introduces to American poetry a startling synthesis of the poetry of wisdom and the freshest music." David Shapiro |
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Rift "[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." Shearsman Magazine (UK) "Peter Cole's poetry envelops light as it conveys light. His line is delicate and ineluctable. Rift locates home through each step of a journey through exile and ecstasy." Brad Morrow |