Flight

Thoughtful and intelligent, the poems in Flight are still fully embodied, rooted entirely in the senses, and extending Coles’s ongoing examination of the big questions: What is the relation of art and science? What are our different ways of knowing, and how do we participate in and understand them? What are the potentials and limitations of perception and intuition? What is the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived, and can the boundaries between them be broken down? And never least, What what does all this tell us about our capacity for love and pleasure, and how does love influence the ways we address the other questions? These poems are deeply engaged with the pleasures of the sensuous, treating thought itself as a sensual activity, as a kind of passion in its own right. William Carlos Williams said, “No ideas but in things”; Coles seems to want to assert that there is no thing–moon, bat, moth, dog, beloved husband–that will not give rise to ideas, and, very often, to pleasure at the same time. More than anything, pleasures are what the poems seek to create and enact–the pleasures of the flesh, yes; and of the mind that is also of the flesh, and that is so present in the poems.