Blackbird and Wolf is a wonderful handful of simple-titled poems, all strung together by the common Henriesque soul-searching and self-reflection. The whole volume gives off a gentle rawness. There are some sensitive subjects addressed very sensitively. Fortunately, Cole’s biography doesn’t impose on the poetry, rather it seeps into what he writes. So, it didn’t hurt to find out that his childhood had been rough, at a tempestuous home with abusive, drunken parents who didn’t provide much support for his search for his identity. [1] He was also raised to be Roman Catholic, turning to prayer and God through such difficult times. Both autobiographical characteristics appear in several of his poems, as he openly reveals the cold relationships between him and his parents and often exclaims to God or refers to a biblical story.
The book is divided into three parts: Birthday, Gravity and Center, and Dune. All of which were named by a central poem within that section. Though, there is some overlap in the overarching themes and motifs between the parts, most generally, there are distinct trends among the parts. The first part, Birthday, is made up of the more autobiographical pieces that reflect on his past and childhood. The second part covers a lot about his love story and a certain “you” of romantic proportions. The last part contains much darker images with melancholy undertones that can easily project onto us readers.
Two representative poems of the first part are “Mimosa Sensitiva” and “Birthday.” In “Mimosa Sensitiva,” Cole describes a scene when he is much younger at eleven years old in a hospital waiting on his mom. The moment must have been a very vivid memory for him, for he writes details of trying on the glasses of his mother who is left “blind, giggling,/ muttering nonsense French.” The scene seems very precious, the way his mom is almost childish, perhaps forgetful of who the boy at her bed is. Even though the giggling moment is very innocent, at the same time it feels somber how it is set in a hospital and how his mother doesn’t quite remember him. Then, immediately within a line, the whole mood changes and his mother is now “in a tangled nightgown…pawing through leaf mulch for pain medicine/ [she] can’t function without.” The poem becomes painful, as we not only witness this private breakdown, but we also see the little boy watching his mother flail in an animal-like manner, thus establishing the unstable reltionship between him and her. However, in the same first part of the book, the poem, “Birthday” has a much more optimistic tone. Perhaps because “Mimosa Sensitiva” is one of the first poems in the section and “Birthday” is one of the last, there may be a sort of upward progression of attitude or growth within the first section. In the poem, Cole recalls being locked in, not as a punishment, but as a sort of freedom. Less harshly as in “Mimosa Sensitiva,” Cole alludes to his rough childhood with the lines, “I remember my father’s angry voice/ mixed with anxiety and love. As always/ the possibility of home—at best an ideal—/ remains illusory.“ We again see the push-pull relationship between Henri Cole and his parents, but this time with his father whose anger has an odd mixture of anxiety and love. Then, we sorrowfully see that a home for him has become somewhat of an ideal because of his own ruined household. Then, Cole is able to turn the mood around and keep that ideal home in a Platonic fashion, imagining on his room floor. The last line of this poem, “Like an outdated map my borders are changing,” ties up this newly gained maturity over the course of Part I: Birthday. He takes all that’s been thrown at him from the past and shifts his borders a bit, takes down some walls and expands his comfort zone.
From Part II, the poems, “Gravity and Center” and “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” show that more mature and romantic mood, characteristic of Part II: Gravity and Center. In “Gravity and Center,” Henri Cole uses the words, “I love you” as a metaphor for all words and how he does not want to let them get in the way of expressing himself. It’s such a great, clean parallel that directly connects to his poetry. “I don’t want words to sever me from reality./ I don’t want to need them” he writes, just as he uses words to describe his feeling in this whole volume. It’s an interesting paradox that is also parallel to that push-pull, love-hate for his parents. Though without metaphor, “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” still is able to elaborate on the relationship between the poet and the “you” lover. For instance he writes, “I cared nothing about/ life outside the walls of our bedroom.” This line puts out a really intimate setting for the whole poem and also reminds us of the “Birthday” poem, in which he didn’t care much for life outside his locked door. He, perhaps so in love, is able to see beauty in something not conventionally beautiful as seen in the line, “Even the white spit on your sharp teeth/ was the foam of love, saying to me: It is not true,/ after all, that you were never loved.”
The poems “Eating the Peach” and “Dead Wren” set the tone of the third part. In “Eating the Peach,” Henri Cole describes eating a fleshy peach like eating a small animal whose skull would was the pit of the peach. With the first line, Cole sets a darker tone than in previous poems, saying, “Eating the peach, I feel like a murderer.” He then goes on to describe sating his hunger on the flesh of the peach in almost savage language. To continue, he describes a backwards evolution. We humans were rooted from a whole of line of ancestors including those with paws and fins. He almost reduces humans, us, to the savage, animal-like days. The other poem “Dead Wren,” does not have a critique on humanity, but it still carries the eerie vibe of death and darkness of Part III. In this poem, Cole recalls a death near him, in fact, a death at his window. All of a sudden “today” becomes a funeral, Cole’s clock becomes an obelisk and his handkerchief becomes the hearse on which he will carry the corpse of the dead bird. The poem feels so haunting how it was so ritual to carry out a funeral, immediately making everyday objects turn into symbols of death.
Along the parts, one can see a large-scale change; they seem to be chronological, not quite in a progression, simply aging. The parts are almost chapters of Henri Cole’s life, each in which he has a struggle that he faces. When younger, in his memories of the first part, his poems are most occupied with his unstable household, while when a little older his concerns are with love and the “you” or possibly more than one “you”s, and when much older, more experienced and wizened, he sees more broadly the chaos of the world and closely philosophizes in a pessimistic manner.
Some overarching themes or prominent motifs of the entire book include the personification of animals or the animalizing of humans with images such as bears, bees, loons, gulls, wrens, sharks and of course the blackbird and the wolf. Perhaps it is Cole’s own interest in nature to use animals as common images in his work, for he also uses trees in his work. Sometimes the trees are the main subjects, the sycamore, the mimosa, the apple tree or the persimmon tree, and other times they make prominent images in the poems, as the tree which bears the wet apples and the tree in which the bear hides. However, there is always a certain wisdom going about each experience of a poem. Henri Cole writes somewhat like a philosopher: very introspective, self-reflective and complex, flowing but sometimes jumping thoughts, but all in very profound language. Because of such complex thought, Cole often writes abstractions or oxymorons, leaving readers pondering his very well thought out words. For example, in “To Sleep” one line reads, “Darkness will give you back unremembering” or in “Ambulance,” where Cole writes, “I felt like the personification of an abstraction,/ like mercy.”
The structure of Henri Cole’s poems are quite uniform; they don’t have any strict line structure or end rhymes to line up. Line breaks simply happen when they need to be, at quite natural pauses. There aren’t interruptions where the lines end in prepositions or articles. But, stanzas are rare; only a few of his longer poems break into stanzas sometimes to introduce a new thought or idea, but at other times the sentence continues across the space to the next stanza. Most of the time, jumped thoughts or ideas simply continue on the next line in the same stanza or in the same line. Though there may be jumps in his train of thought, there’s still a sense of fluidity, of constant pondering and almost like a well-organized stream of consciousness. Also, Henri Cole’s poems are for the most part free verse; there is the occasional internal rhyme such as “pity the poor and avert war” from “To the Forty-third President.” But those rhymes seem to have effortlessly come about while writing. Along with the natural line breaks, Cole’s poems have ordinary punctuation with periods at the ends of sentences and several commas throughout. Because the punctuation is really standard, something we’re used to seeing when reading, it does not distract from the meaning and organization of the poem.
The poems, though at first read seem like a motley of Cole’s words, weave themselves into each other. Between the poems, they all reference each other. One poem will just say one word, that was so prominent and important in another poem that we resurface it from our memory. For example in “Bowl of Lilacs,” Henri Cole says, “the act of looking and perceiving/ was no longer something understood/ from the exterior. It was pure being.” Then a few poems down in “My Weed,” there is a line that reads, “I circled around it and looked a lot,/ which is to say, I was just being,” somewhat of a repetition of the former line. Another example is in “Mirror,” where an image of a silvery body like an ember alludes to the poem “Embers.”
There are many of those lines or words that one can immediately link back to another poem in the collection, but there is one poem that seems to be dedicated to that task. The last poem in the book, “Dune,” stands out in length, content and voice compared to the rest of the poems. It is as if the form of this last poem was to use the vocabulary already written. I see the word “treetops” and instantly think up the wind raking the treetops in “Self-portrait with Hornets.” Then, I spot the word campfire and I remember the simile of the moon sprinkling light like the campfire in “Embers.” It acts somewhat like a conclusion, stringing everything from the top to the bottom together. Also, perhaps because the poem is longer, Cole is able to go into more elaborate descriptions. In his other poems he sometimes uses very concrete similes before leading into some unfathomable abstraction. However, in “Dune,” there is one moment, where, for a whole stanza, he provides us vivid concrete images to draw out in detail and digest. “Dune” is also the only poem where he acknowledges his presence as writer instead of persona. The whole book is a self-portrait of Henri Cole, even when he writes all about the special “you” some aspect of his character is revealed in the poems. In “Dune,” he deliberately opens the curtains and doesn’t just show us the normal “I,” but we get the unmasked, blunt self. He writes “I think I’m at the lowest level of actual control…I want to write something highly controlled,” taking himself out of the picture, showing him not as a character in his poems, but as the writer himself. Even in the line, “While I am writing this, the cat scratches herself/ and rubs her belly against my knees, purring,” Henri Cole almost addresses his readers personally, describing his literal actions, unlike the normal soul-searching sort of actions in the rest of the collection.
Though Cole intended to not be trapped or limited by his words, he ends his book claiming “poetry, which is stronger/ than I am, makes me do what it wants.” So, in a way poetry forced him to create this very honest volume, this very raw self-expression, a self-portrait that made him confront himself and then let us in on this very personal piece of art.
Cole, Henri. Blackbird and Wolf. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007.
[1] Borzoi Reader Authors, Henri Cole, “How I Grew,” http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/cole/poetsonpoetry.html accessed 22 January 2011.
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