Draw Me After: Poems

by Peter Cole

Overview

“Cole’s splendid ear orchestrates awakenings.” —Forrest Gander, author of Twice Alive

Peter Cole’s luminous new book is in many ways his freest and most moving to date. In Draw Me After, Cole evolves a supple, singular music that charts regions of wonder and danger, from Eden as a place of first response and responsibility to modern sites of natural and political catastrophe.

At the heart of the volume lie two remarkable series: one translates drawings by Terry Winters into a textured language spun from the material abstractions of Winters’s art; the other winds through the book in dreamlike fashion, offering prismatic and often haunting meditations on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet—in kabbalistic tradition, the building blocks of existence. Inventive and receptive, physical, metaphysical, and playful, Cole’s poetry disturbs and enchants with “a quiet, streaming power . . . that leads the reader back to it over and over again” (Ray González, The Bloomsbury Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374605377
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/22/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Peter Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957. The author of several previous books of poems, including Hymns&Qualms and Rift, and he has also translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic works—both medieval and modern. He is the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
Peter Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957. He has written several books of poems, including Hymns&Qualms and Rift, and he has also translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic works—both medieval and modern. He is the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Table of Contents

Edensong xi

I

This Pig I 3

Aleph : &cgpI; 4

Look Again 5

Bet : &cgpB; 10

Gold Lingers 11

Gimmel : &cgpDD; 12

What the Beard Said 14

Dalet : &cgpT; 15

Late Fragments 17

Hey : &cgpA; 19

So the Days 20

II

Vav : &cgpK; 25

A Man Lives in a World 27

Zayin : &cgpO; 28

Eating Paradise 29

From The Qualmist's Quair 30

Chet : &cgpH; 38

Let's Not Get Carried Away 40

Tet : &cgpV; 41

III On Being Drawn

I "Drawing draws us in-" 47

II "Charcoal's quiet and chalky mist" 49

III "Odd how globs form morulae" 50

IV "There is a score to all" 52

V "Ink can twist it-" 54

VI "This writing's on and off the wall" 55

VII "An ark so dark it" 57

VIII "This world's dotty matrix calls" 61

IX "How does this drawer hold it" 63

IV

Yod : &cgpL; 67

Hearsing 68

Kaf : &cgpEE; 69

Lámed : &cgpN; 70

How Could It Happen 71

As: 73

Mem : &cgpS; 74

Nun : &cgpJ; 75

Can You Hear Me? 76

Samekh : &cgpX; 78

Ayin : &cgpM; 79

I Went Out Toward My Life 80

Peh : &cgpZ; 81

V

These Pieces 85

Tsadi : &cgpU; 92

Quf : &cgpF; 93

The Ghazal of What's More Than Real 96

Reish : &cgpD; 98

Shin : &cgpP; 100

What the Beard Said, III 102

Tav : &cgpG; 103

Coda: 109

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Draw Me After

"Peter Cole has been merging the work of poet and translator for nearly half a century, reminding us that writing is always a translation—of thought, impulse, feeling, memory, image, time . . . Cole’s voice is incomparable." —Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's

"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 . . . An outstanding collection." —Michael Autrey, Booklist (Starred Review)

“A stunning book. Beautiful, delicate, tough, intricate, clear—often in the same poem. This really is ‘equipment for living.’” —Christian Wiman, author of Survival Is a Style

“‘Waking the letters from their slumber’: that’s Peter Cole’s mad, sublime task in these phantasmagoric poems. Every line of this book breaks the literal—the letters—into visionary scenes where sorrow marries joy and blessings almost rhyme with curse. A revelation.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth

"Peter Cole shows himself in Draw Me After to be our great master of ekphrasis. Visually, sonically, rhythmically, semantically, his are some of the most inventive, witty, profound, and genuinely beautiful lyric poems of our moment." —Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics

Praise for Peter Cole

“One of the best religious poets writing in English.” —Anthony Domestico, Commonweal

“Peter Cole’s work defies traditional distinctions—between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original… [The] rigor, vigor, joy, and wit of his [poems] have expanded the imaginative capacities of what the unimaginative might call his ‘target language’.” —Joshua Cohen, Paris Review

“[Peter 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

From the Publisher

11/01/2022

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

Library Journal