Drifter by Douglas Cole

 

In Douglas Cole’s Drifter, we enter space differently, move toward or away from things according to Guy Debord’s Theory of the dérive which assumes the shape of poetry itself, with the poet’s paintbrush working vividly, mixing history with today’s dilemmas. This powerful collection will haunt you like a ghost who knows your every secret.

–Margaret Randall. Author of I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary; Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises; Fuera de la violencia hacia la poesía / Out of Violence into Poetry and many other award-wining works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

 

Douglas Cole’s Drifter focuses exactly on that—a kind of drifting called the dérive. I urge you to read this book and pick up your own surprising, magical currents. His poems conjure spells as he lifts the veil off our everyday vision to create new light, new insights, combining the spiritual and philosophical in completely grounded ways. He is the kind of guide who walks beside you, not in front of you—a modest comrade who has never lost his sense of wonder and mystery in the world.

–Jim Daniels, poet, screenwriter, author of Street Caligraphy Human Engine at Dawn, The Middle Ages

 

Douglas Cole writes unpretentious, image-rich poetry with such gritty, gut-wrenching honesty, he’ll haunt you long after a reading of his work.

–Dan Sicoli, Co-Editor of Slipstream and author of Pagan Supper and The Allegories

 

Douglas Cole’s Drifter reads as if immersed in a surreal dream. Guided by Theremin music only wind can create, across the space where burning sunsets disappear among ghostly whispers, the crucifixion out of the dust echoing, drifting along the litany of solitude and the blessed resurrection of the unheard and the dark echo of nothingness. As I immerse myself into the images, I feel the cold granite of DC and the cold snow of the Siskiyou mountains. Douglas Cole’s poems walk along Mario Benedetti’s Cotidianas, where all the daily little things we do are life, the same life we live. These poems have the SLAM!

–Raúl Sánchez, City of Redmond Washington’s Poet Laureate. author of When There Were No Borders and All Our Brown Skinned Angels

 

My first college writing professor said there are two approaches to a poem: looking in, as a way to look out, or looking out as a way to look in. In Drifter, Douglas Cole chooses the latter, looking out through his poems and poetic prose. Throughout this fascinating book are quotes by Guy De Bord on his theory of  Derive, or drifting alone or with others. I love the observing eye that is the observing I in Drifter. From “Place is the House of Being,” the first stanza: We arrive in flesh machines/ and walk among crowds unseen/ while in the back of the mind/ god’s finger stirs a pool of dreams//  Wow.

–Donna Hilbert, author of Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022