Draw Me After

Peter Cole's luminous new book calls us to poetry's lyric root and power: "Wanting song / in the beginning / beginning to end /now we are falling . . ." In Draw Me After, his sixth collection, and in many ways his freest and most moving to date, Cole evolves a supple, singular music that charts regions of wonder and danger, from Eden as a mythic place of first response and responsibility to sites of psychological, natural, and political catastrophe.

At the heart of the volume lie two remarkable series: one "translates" drawings by the artist Terry Winters into a textured language spun from the material abstractions of Winters's gnomic, celebratory art; the other winds through the book in dreamlike fashion, offering prismatic and often haunting meditations on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet-in kabbalistic tradition, the building blocks of existence. Inventive and receptive, physical, metaphysical, and playful, Cole's poetry disturbs and enchants with what one critic has called "a quiet, streaming power that leads the reader back to it over and over again" (The Bloomsbury Review).