Norma Cole

This was probably the most inscrutable collection of poems I've ever read. Here's an example:

Blackberry bushes beside the freeway. Ajuga (bugleweed). Without
leave. Howl, Homer. Sylvia rode up on her bike smiling younger than
springtime. A child is able, hears music as other music.
I wasn't sleeping. The government begins without bees, rocks,
figuring out how much time's gone by by how cold the coffee gets.
Now is the cover of your pen and ink. Names the human project:
earmuffs: shamrocks: a verbal gap. In the early part of the morning a
small hole in the ceiling, a foot pulls up into the hole, ceiling covers
over paradise or charade. You never hear from her. Picking up tissue
from the floor. Transport. They can't stand and shoot. And talk
to each other (even) can't talk to each other, as I said. Up-coming
passages. Epistle of forgiveness: spat on the hair, spat on the faces,
spat on the other foot. Mount Brake-up or Back-up. Heals the words
in her foot. She got plenty. To be or not the little dot bouncing
toward her.

Reading this collection reminded me of the book English As She Is Spoke, the ill-fated but humorous attempt by two 19th century Portuguese men who didn't know English to create a Portuguese-English guide book using Portuguese-French and French-English dictionaries, with predictably disastrous results. However, Win These Posters doesn't have that as an excuse to explain its unfathomable poems.

I may give this book another go, after I have a few gin and tonics as a comprehension aid.… (mehr)

Although there are many good poems among those collected here, I honestly appreciated Cole's book Natural Light(published around the same time & a few poems of which have been included in Where Shadows Will) more than I did this Selected Poems. Strangely, even the poems from Natural Light seem slightly diminished by their inclusion in this anthology (a Collected Works is a kind of anthology) Perhaps it's simply a change of context: more self-referential in that collected poems are intended to reflect the poet more explicitly than when let loose in the world in their original wrappings (as individual poems or books).
Also, my appreciation for Cole’s poems grew as time passed. That is to say, I like the more recent poems better than the earlier ones.… (mehr)