Peter Cole

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...

Acclaimed essayist Hoffman and MacArthur-winning poet and translator Cole tell the story of the recovery from a Cairo geniza (a repository for worn-out texts) of the most vital cache of Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered.

"In the incantatory "I'm Sad," the great Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai wails: "I'm sad, / sad, sad / about the dead, / I'm sad / about the dead / about the dead, / about the wounded, / sad / about the homes / sad, / sad, sad / also about the fork / thrown onto the floor, / about the bulbs, / burnt-out and broken / or left behind, / still alive / dangling from the ceiling ..." An outspoken Israeli critic of his government's treatment of the Palestinians,...