Hymns & Qualms

"Peter Cole’s Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations cannot be recommended strongly enough. I’m working through it as slowly as I can stand to, which is not very slowly, because the poems—whether translated from sixth-century Arabic or twentieth-century Hebrew or written by Cole himself—burst with brilliance and vitality. One doesn’t read the poems so much as ride them as they soar across the ages and the spheres. Shmuel HaNagid (who lived in Spain in the eleventh century and served as vizier to the Berber king) is just one of many voices I was awestruck to discover: 'On couches stretched out at the treasury, / where the guards’ vigilance knows no relief, / you fell asleep without fear by the window / and time came through like a thief.' Elsewhere, Cole’s own 'Song of the Shattering Vessels' is a Kabbalist mystery made lucid: 'Now the lovers’ mouths are open — / maybe the miracle’s about to start; / the world within us coming together, / because all around us it’s falling apart.' Am I the only one imagining this incanted by Leonard Cohen? Hymns and Qualms is a wise and radiant collection; we are lucky to have our path lit by the light it gives."—Justin Taylor, The Paris Review

"Hymns & Qualms includes more than 20 years' worth of poems and translations by American Peter Cole, whose awards include a Guggenheim and a MacArthur fellowship. New work appears, intermingled, at the front of the book. After that, Cole's original verse alternates with his translations of mystic poetry from the 11th through the 21st centuries, weaving back and forth as if in conversation about life's greatest mysteries. Cole, who draws from both Hebraic and Arabic traditions, is like a modern psalmist who leads readers on a journey filled with wit, awe, and skepticism. A desire for wisdom and transcendence permeates the collection. Cole understands that poetry 'doesn't create out of nothing./ It works through what's found: it discovers,/ and much like influence, it recovers/ a charge that's already there,/ potentially, in the air.'"—Elizabeth Lund, The Christian Science Monitor

“I love this book-for its idiosyncratic music, its moral and spiritual intelligence, and the balance it maintains between pain and joy, provocation and solace. People are always asking, What’s the point of poetry when the world is going to hell? Hymns & Qualms is a potent reply.”—Christian Wiman

“Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.”—Harold Bloom

“Peter Cole sings like nobody else in English today, his ear attuned to the prosodies of classical Arabic and the Hebrew lyrics of al-Andalus. In his poetry we hear shards of that ‘pure language’ which, according to Benjamin, arises when languages come together—and apart—in translation. Every rift of these Hymns & Qualms is loaded with ore.”—Richard Sieburth

“Peter Cole’s work is an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us. His work represents the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years.”—Richard Howard