Despite standout moments and lines, the poems are often either too restrained or too blatant in their sentiment. The poems are never bad; but they’re too often not great either. The formality, the mock sonnets throughout, often work against, as opposed to in service of, the poems, leaving them drained of passion. Readers may find themselves nodding in agreement when the poet writes: “I need everything within / to be livelier….” The poems that break from form are the strongest in the collection. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for the next book. Only recommended for devotees. Return to Cole’s Invisible Man (or even Middle Earth) instead.

Pastoral poets are some of my favorites and ANYONE endorsed by Louise Gluck I will happily read. Safe to say, it was a great read.

I find poetry is a subjective topic when it comes to enjoyment. While the poems are well written they were just not to my taste preference and therefore not something I enjoyed. I would recommend seeing if Henri Cole's style is something you enjoy you might enjoy the collection but it wasn't for me. I received my copy through NetGalley for an honest review.

A nice poetry collection although I had sometimes trouble understunding fully what the indent was. It was a short and quick read and I finished it in one sitting. Overall definitly recommend this even though it was not perfect for me! I have friends who are much more into poetry than I am (I'm slowly getting there) and I think those would love it.

Blizzard by Henri Cole is a poetry collection of small, personal moments: catching a glimpse of deer grazing alongside the runway in the moment before takeoff, peeling potatoes, removing a bat from the house, watching workers erect a party tent. While the moments often show us a world where nature and speaker come face to face or sometimes collide — the aforementioned deer and bat, a snail carried to safer ground, mushrooms fried in butter — it’s also a world that moves outward from the small and the personal to broader concerns of art and politics.

In the first poem, for instance, “Face of the Bee,” the speaker directly addresses the bee as he is “waving my arms to make you go away,” but segues immediately from that singular intimate moment to “No one is truly the owner of his own instincts,/but controlling them — this is civilization.” And then it’s into personal history — “I thank my mother and father for this” and then art enters into the poem by circling back around to the bee imagery as the speaker “metaboliz [es] life into language, like nectar sipped up and regurgitated into gold.”

Cole continues to circle back to images and phrases and object/creatures, to echo them throughout the collection so that one poem often bleeds into another immediately after or soon to follow. As when, for instance, in “The Party Tent,” “a crew will remove the damaged sod,” while in the following poem “At the Grave of Robert Lowell, “he, she, all of them lie under sod.” Or when, in “Human Highway,” a “groggy back” flitting about in the backyard recalls to mind the “groggy bat” the speaker of “To a Bat” pick up to out “outside in a hydrangea bush.” There are many such echoes through Blizzard, leading us smoothly from one poem to the other, emphasizing a sense of interconnectedness, and lending a sense of unity to the voice so that one gets a sense of a singular, or at least narrower, self than sometimes arises out of a collection.

It’s a self that closely observes the world, who has a gentle, caring nature so that he will release that bat not just into the world but into a bush where it might rest and then launch itself from, or who in a moment of empathy for a snail also involved in the “long game, the whole undignified, insane attempt at living” moves it from the dangerous roadside to the woods.

As with any collection, the poems vary in their impact (and one’s mileage will vary as well most likely as to where particular poems stand in that sense). Most are relatively short (many sonnet length), and while I did highlight several lines that particularly struck me, there were fewer such moments than I would have preferred, with some of the poems therefore falling a bit flat for me. Cole shows a deft, subtle hand in his use of sound (note for instance the assonance and consonance in the line quoted above from “Face of the Bee”—the hard “I” of “lize, life, and like”, the soft and hard “g”s carrying us from “language” to “regurgitated” to “gold”). But it was the voice and persona I found myself responding most often to, with my favorite poems being when language and persona/voice both hit a strong note. One of my favorites, for instance, is “Departure,” where the speaker looks out the window while his plane is de-icing to see two deer: “the buck’s head is adorned with a forest /that renews itself each year,” one of those lines I highlighted. As the plane, a product of industry, is being rid of its dangerous frost coat, the deer, in their natural world, “wear an ice frock . . . the bottoms of their hooves listening to the frozen landscape.” A moment later, the speaker, his attention turned to the interior of the plane and his newspaper full of the human world, finds he cannot fully depart that moment: “What was that back there? Time is short. /If tenderness approaches, run to it.”

There is certainly worse advice out there. And that voice counseling tenderness, that eye so closely observant, makes Blizzard an easy collection to recommend, even if I wouldn’t have minded a bit more from the language itself.

I am new to the poetry of Cole, but have read such positive reviews of previous collections. I did not find much in this collection that really stood out as most of the poems just felt flat. I do read a lot of poetry, but am not sure I will be looking to revisit Cole's work any time soon.

A lovely, breathtaking poetry book. I always find poetry hard to review, because so much of what I like and don't like is personal - and often very tricky to articulate. It's all about FEELING. Henri Cole writes short yet dense works that touch on everything from life/death to pitching a tent, stradling the boundary between literal and figurative with perfect grace. The scope manages to be large and small at the same time, and although I never felt that gut-punch shiver that comes with reading a truly spectacular poem, I enjoyed each one. BLIZZARD was a positive experience, definitely, and I look forward to returning to this collection & Cole's work again.

Name: Blizzard: Poems
Poet: Henri Cole
Genre: Poetry
Review:
This book is a collection of beautiful poetries and poems. His poems are lyrical, lucid and empowering. His words are daring, and they have a sort of cold rage filled in them. The poems drift through various topics like love, life, war, drugs, and many more. This book of poetry is more like a blizzard of emotions, which shakes us to the very last cell of our body. Expressive, elucidate and empathetic, this book will leave speechless.

I enjoyed this! I loved seeing Seamus Heaney's influence and allusions throughout the book, and some of the dark imagery and illusions. A few poems fell flat for me, but on the whole I enjoyed the book.

Typical poetry book. Was a beautiful quick read. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The poetry style is good, it reads nicely. It's a weird contrast between the every day topics it talks about, and the deep meaning that the poetry itself is trying to accomplish. Not my favorite style.
Haiku and Blizzard are the ones I liked the most.

I think this collection was not for me, or I might not have read them at the right time and although some poems spoke to me most remained unclear at best. I always find it difficult to rate poetry as this is so personal and there is no required elements to base yourself upon (world building, character's development, etc.) except your feelings. At the end, I unfortunately did not click with this one.

Thanks to Netgalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC.

I find that every now and then I need to add some poetry into my reads. I like the freshness they bring and I feel that I reset myself for my next reads. This poetry book delivered that and should be added to your poetry shelf. I think it will hit a chord with a lot of readers. I enjoyed the balance of uncomfortable moments with the exciting ones. So many things were explored in these poems - for example, friends, family, loved ones, loss, animals and bugs, and so much more.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a copy.

Blizzard reveals a sense of jarring discomfort and disconnections in places and relationships yet simultaneously celebrates wondrous moments of kinship, belonging, and understanding. Juxtaposing internal and external states of being - in isolation, in love, in nature, in motion, while dreaming, at home, at rest - Cole peers into his own DNA and finds ancestors, family, friends, animals, insects, thunder, sunlight, music, war, peace, love, and loss. Reflections of universal truths, fears and desires will resonate with readers; this titles deserves it's place among every new poetry shelf.