[Peter Cole\'s] poetry is perhaps most 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.
In the process, he defies traditional distinctions between new and old, familiar and foreign, translation and original--"as though," in his own words, "living itself were an endless translation..
From his earliest registrations of the Jerusalem landscape\'s stark power to electric renderings of mystical medieval Hebrew hymns; from his kabbalistically inspired recent Poems to sensuous versions of masterworks of Muslim Spain; and from his provocative presentation of contemporary poetry from Palestine and Israel to his own dazzling reckonings with politics, beauty, and the double-edged dynamic of influence, Cole offers a ramifying vision of connectedness.
Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness."Cole is a maker--of Poems and worlds.
He is, Harold Bloom writes, "a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.
Praised for his "prosodic mastery" and "keen moral intelligence" (American Poets), and for the "rigor, vigor, joy, and wit" of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work that plumbs centuries of wisdom while paying sharp attention to the textures and tensions of the present.
Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off--the affective range is wide and the forms restless."--Ben Lerner, BOMBHymns & Qualms brings together Mac Arthur Fellow Peter Cole\'s acclaimed poetry and translations, weaving them into a helical whole. [Peter Cole\'s] poetry is perhaps most 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
