"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics-poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life-that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, "persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended in The Visible Man, particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man."
"The invention of a self so harrowing in character will remind readers of the confessions in Robert Lowell's Life Studies . . . Most other books would be reduced to ashes by the comparison."
William Logan, The Washington Post Book World
"* In his fourth collection, Henri Cole has submitted to the unsparing self-examination and self-generated demand for change that mark the true artist . . . The voice that breaks the poems open frees itself in a crucible of confession and absolution, through poems that incorporate history, art, religion, family, and sexuality."
