Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

by Peter Cole

"[Peter Cole's] poetry is perhaps most 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

Hymns & Qualms brings together MacArthur Fellow Peter Cole's acclaimed poetry and translations, weaving them into a helical whole. Praised for his "prosodic mastery" and "keen moral intelligence" (American Poets), and for the "rigor, vigor, joy, and wit" of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work that plumbs centuries of wisdom while paying sharp attention to the textures and tensions of the present. He is, Harold Bloom writes, "a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation. Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness."

Cole is a maker--of poems and worlds. From his earliest registrations of the Jerusalem landscape's stark power to electric renderings of mystical medieval Hebrew hymns; from his kabbalistically inspired recent poems to sensuous versions of masterworks of Muslim Spain; and from his provocative presentation of contemporary poetry from Palestine and Israel to his own dazzling reckonings with politics, beauty, and the double-edged dynamic of influence, Cole offers a ramifying vision of connectedness. In the process, he defies traditional distinctions between new and old, familiar and foreign, translation and original--"as though," in his own words, "living itself were an endless translation."

Genres: Poetry

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Peter Cole has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and in 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Reviews

[Atri]

"Poetry is something between
the dream
and the reading."
...
To be a link
to something more

and in that thinking -
to know its core.
...
We do live through more than we are,
Or are we more than we normally live through?

***

Evincing the infinite-
the size of your palm-
what it holds is beyond you,
curious, at hand.

***

Violent or soft, the unrecorded
word is like an instant's
shadow, a bay's ripple, or sea's,
leaving its fading mark on us.

[Margaryta]

Cole made me sit and focus on what it is that draws me to poetry and how I think about a poem, how I read it and what I "get out of it". The flow both to his own poems and to his translations carried me along and grabbed my interest, as did his occasional wordplay. There was often a beautifully crafted atmosphere that I felt myself wading into. Perhaps the most challenging was finding a way of understanding and appreciating, to use the crudest of terms, the spiritual poetry and the kind of God both Cole and the poets whose work he was translating had in mind. Cole offered me something to think about, and "Hymns & Qualms" was not only a perfect introduction to his work but also a rich breadth that provided multiple facets for consideration at once.

[Fredore Praltsa]

time itself conceived of
as an electron cloud above us ....

--

Freud said he could never be certain
in view of his wide and early reading,
whether what seemed like a new creation
might not be the work instead
of hidden channels of memory leading
back to the notions of others absorbed,
coming now anew into form
he'd almost known within him was growing.
He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia.
So we own and owe what we know.

--

our innermost thoughts are foreign,
implanted with great cunning

Thus the outer
world of the inner
world that all can see

and that inner world of what's beyond me—

it shames me

--
Of Santob de Carrión:

We were discussing pleasure
and happiness, and the world's
mutability: Someone said the
sage is he who knows

that the higher one falls from,
the worse the wound;
and he who leads his life
along the plain

fears neither loss nor pain.
Someone else said, So
he knows it. That doesn't
say what he'll do.

[Laura]

overall this collection did not excite me. perhaps at a different time some of these poems might have spoken to me more. I find the religious nature of many of them i did not connect with.

[Jamie]

Arabic and Hebrew poetry is a genre I want more of.