Draw Me After

November 1, 2022

Living in both Jerusalem and Connecticut, MacArthur fellow Cole (Hymns & Qualms) is an award-winning translator, poet, and part-time Yale professor whose seventh book exemplifies the question he discussed in an interview with Ben Lerner in BOMB: "What is the sacred and how does it feed or impede us?" To answer, Cole looks at the connection between the Hebrew alphabet and words, language and poetry, body and spirit, sacred and profane. Humans, according to Cole, live in two worlds (as he does); they are falling away from paradise while Eden draws them back. The standout "Yod" suggests that humankind's "squiggle/ scrawl" is reaching to an "Eminence" that "bends/ down to call/ us through duration." Caught between the heavenly and earthly states, poets hear music, i.e., the words of the poem. Take "Look Again," where one word builds on another word until there's music that sparks a fire, generating colors and becoming light, darkness, landscape, then breath, and ultimately creating (as in Genesis) life in the poem and the reader. VERDICT Coming from Cole's fascination with word play and paradox, the best of these poems are laced with alliteration and rhyme, shape-shifting as they focus on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the creative process. For poetry readers who like pondering deep questions.--Diane Scharper

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Starred review from October 15, 2022
It is rare for a poet to produce a book as memorable as The Invention of Influence (2014) and then bring forth another title that is just as distinct and remarkable. MacArthur fellow and renowned translator Cole's sixth collection marks a breaking out or through to new lyric powers. Of the five sections, the only one named, "One Being Drawn," is dedicated to the abstract painter Terry Winters and central to the book. Ekphrasis, the Greek word for rendering a work of art in words, is a kind of translation eminently suited to Winters' work. Just as Winters' drawings are battles to a draw between representation and the doodle, so do these poems realize their own integrity as they move between lyric and abstract statement. The 22 poems, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, are alchemical amalgams of ekphrasis, homage, and commentary. "Eating Paradise" begins, "There is no recipe for this dish-- / this meal of early evening stillness, / this light like powder / over the harbor's / crushed lapis that lifts in its sinking". Beautifully modulating tone and color, the poem reminds us of how hard it is to be perceptive about misperception. An outstanding collection.

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