The quick details of the clock, the bottle, the tulips set the sad scene, and then the weather outside. Or a little room in which glowing cigarettesĬame and went, like souls losing magnitude, Reaching out into a dark and crowded space, The parrot tulips-everything possessed his face,Ĭhaste and obscure. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, Myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The poems are strange and new and, at times, deeply moving. Middle Earth escapes all the praise I can heap upon it.” Henri Cole’s new poems, proud and knowing and wounded, archly suspicious, can be revealing because they guard their privacies so well. Years later, I bought Cole’s Middle Earth, a book that Logan described as “the most intimate book of poetry since Plath’s Ariel. Knowing that nothing pleased him, I asked William what poet he did like. Williams poetry, Logan wrote, it’s “like watching a dog eat its own vomit.” Adrienne Rich: “I could almost review Adrienne Rich in my sleep (sometimes, reading her, I feel I am asleep).” Mary Oliver: her “bland, consolatory poetry is a favorite of people who don’t like poetry.” In fact, he’d just won the National Book Critics Award for Criticism and was later dubbed “the most hated man in American poetry.” Logan’s criticisms are cruel and hilarious. Logan is a poet, but, perhaps, most known as a critic.

The first class I took with him ended up a bust when Harry bailed out and William Logan took over. In 1987, I came to the University of Florida to study fiction with Harry Crews, among others.

Middle Earth by Henri Cole