Review by Booklist Review
Cole (The Poetry of the Kabbalah, 2012) is an esteemed and prolific translator, concentrating on Hebrew literature, notably poetry from medieval Spain, and the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur genius grant. The Invention of Influence is his fourth collection, and it is masterful. Harold Bloom's introduction an imprimatur of quality if there ever was one combines fulsome praise with careful and welcome exposition of some of the countless allusions in this deeply profound, committed verse. The long narrative title poem examines the life and work of Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Freud who committed suicide. The variety of verse forms, the attention to and respect for Tausk's complex path, the pressure the poem contains and releases it might be a masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, Cole seems concerned most often with translation, in all its possible permutations: from language to language, from idea into word, from the unspeakable into speech: We're not quite sons, he cautions, of God / but might be children of the Word. --Autrey, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
MacArthur Fellow Cole's fourth volume of original poetry (after Things On Which I've Stumbled) retains tangible traces of his work as a translator of the poetry of Hebrew mystics. These poems extend the mystics' project, seeking the spiritual self and finding it, quite often, in the threshold between "world" and "word." Split into three sections, this book begins and ends with Cole's attempt to arrive, through poems whose prosody bears the heavy influence of Dickinson and Blake, at his own tractate in which a reader may find the glimmer of an answer, however liminal: "Only angels in the poem live on// as characters catching the light between things." But it is the middle section, the collection's eponymous long poem, that is by far its most absorbing. The story of Freud's under-appreciated and complicated disciple Victor Tausk, who developed the concept of the "influence machine" to which the paranoid schizophrenic falls prey, serves as a rich backdrop against which Cole deeply explores wide ranging concerns. Textured with rabbinic teachings, translations of the letters of Tausk and Freud, and Cole's own voice, the masterful long poem is "born of a need to explain the cause/ of things inherent in man." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Veteran poet and MacArthur Fellow Cole (Things on Which I've Stumbled) writes beautifully about the intricacies of the world that we see and the one we imagine and connect our thoughts to-"He turns the wind into his messenger." Surrendered to the mystical, grounded in the physical, the poems arrive at their appointed time. Like the parts of Cole's Influence Machine "we are what we become in its import"-unfinished yet refined we sway with his lines in the rhythm of a lyrical truth-"Words are seeds, like taste on another's tongue."-AP (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
