Praise for THE GOLD TOOTH IN THE CROOKED SMILE OF GOD by Douglas Cole

The poems in this generous collection mirror the chosen title. One after another they engage our not-so-secret foibles, desires, rants & ravages. & they leap around, which keeps us slightly off-balance but engaged & curious, what will the poet come up with next?

Not one (thankfully) to follow a theme per se, Cole would rather dance with time, with community, with characters & predicaments that attract & some that repel. There is also a touch of nostalgia, as in the longish poem L A Days that speaks of his younger years in Los Angeles & ends with a dream of a man going into a theater to watch the movie of his life, saying,

“I remember that,
or, that never happened,
or . . . oh, man, I wish I could do that again.”

In delivering us into his world, Coles does not disappoint. His poem Father and Son speaks of being a kid & boxing a bigger kid while his father & the kid’s father got drunk & urged him on - marrying duty to determination.

His poem Mad Alice is another intriguing look at family in all its complexities. Time of the Greats – so appropriate today with that anything-but-great sitting in our White House – tells of heroes & the sadness that follows their loss, not only for the writer but for the generation that had lost them – names like Bessie Smith & Miles Davis & Hemingway & the list goes on – we do miss our ‘heroes & I suspect each era will have theirs to savor & to lose.

In the long poem “Bryan”, Cole paints an intense & intimate portrait of someone who has touched him deeply – through all the upheavals, torment & pain, Cole ends the poem in an uplifting commemorative posture:

“There’s a star for you
There’s a shooting star
You lovers and sad sailors
Rolling on decks and unreal seas
All around
That’s my fiery blaze
Flashing out up there
So make a wish!”

In essence, there is much that has captivated me in reading The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God, especially Douglas Cole’s mastery of the poetic line, his sparse use of adjectives & his uncanny ability to surprise with a quirky turn of phrase, mastery of enjambment & quick shifts in tempo. This is a book to be relished – Don’t miss the opportunity.​

-- Roger Aplon

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Douglas Cole’s latest collection of poems titled The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God is a challenge from beginning to end, where the outcome varies, as it does in all good poetry, according to what the reader brings to it or fashions from it while reading. Cole is unusually adept at leaving enough unsaid to require the reader to enter what Gaston Bachelard calls a reverie of will, in this case interpreted as “I will puzzle this out.”
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Accustomed to exploring in my own poetry the body of God as it appears to us through incarnation in nature and in human creativity, I approached Cole’s work with great interest. His book is a rare opportunity to consider human life lived in cities, among “those sad, ugly, wretched, addicted/ poisonous and scabrous souls/ crawling through their days/ or sitting on a city bus beside that clean,/ grinning, happy-dull, complacent/ everything-goes-right for me/ citizen of the universe ….” The clearest “big picture” of what the book is about occurs in “Time of the Greats”:
 
… the time of the greats of America is gone
Mohamed Ali Hemingway Miles Davis
Billie Holiday the great generals
great ambition great dreams and great vision
ability to say I am the greatest and believe it
gone and in its place unquiet squabbling
and bickering people in constant irritation
standing in lines overcrowded oversaturated
watching the world die wishing it weren't
 
The poet asks, “What can I offer?” in the face of constant apocalypse? He answers with these poems, and I can add that what he offers is the gift of attention and densely framed detail, given without judgment, with empathy, and in beauty.

The poems provide interesting glimpses into the lives of ordinary people who commute on public transportation and pour out of buses into offices for their work week and gladly leave work for evenings and weekends to roam the streets for comfort zones where they dream of the bland better life of those with more money to spend. Here, “Bars exhale their patrons, the street/ trebles like a song, and inside every house/ when one light goes off, another comes on.”

But what does Douglas Cole mean by imaging God as a face, sometimes revealing in a crooked smile the hidden presence of a gold tooth with its associations of decay and repair? Is it there to warm your lonely heart? There to amuse? There to make you wish for gold? Literal gold as in gold toilets? No, that would be dreamed only by the “smug and rich and unconscious/ walking over your body to the club/ uninterested in your dreams or journeys.” How about metaphorical gold, as in meaning and purpose and beauty?

One clue to Cole's intention is in the epigraph, lines taken from singer Jim White's Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a film starring, among others, novelist Harry Crews, where the search for God is a road trip in a classic car through the rural South, in search of beauty and meaning imaged as “the gold tooth in God's crooked smile.” Cole adapts this fascinating image to hover over the present condition in largely secular urban areas in the West: bland Sundays full of loneliness, drifting, or driving to a library full of “old books that whisper/ stories of another age and near/ death experiences no one will ever read/ yet remain the way all things remain/ in the vast vault memory of God ….”

He describes this world as “Pragmatic. American stoicism,/ a grim fortitude of disappointment/ and distrust …,” a place where religion, for many people, has no longer a vital sense of immediate reality but rather is a vague or distorted expression of what was once Almighty God, looming up there like a cloudy face, possibly grinning at the goings-on among his earthly creatures and perhaps, just perhaps, although out of sight but not completely out of mind, there may be a glint of gold lurking inside that grin … a tooth of hope … for beauty, for value and meaning that used to lure people to church, to make life feel worthwhile.

Cole focuses on the harshness that dwells among people who have been “gut-punched” by life, harshness expressed in “Thoughts of a Hanged Man” as cold, hate, hunger, fear, pain, nightmares, shame, regrets, bad choices, and waiting in line. “In Those Days” speaks of “people coupling and fragmenting/ in a particle accelerator of lives—/ and when the fires came, we scattered like cockroaches,/ found other rooms in which to sleep,/ to play and drink and seek oblivion.”

Here, there is little opportunity to enter Bachelard’s balancing reverie of repose, except in occasional significant lonely moments created by smoke, drink, drifting, where fantasy life takes over in daydreams of, for instance, “a Mai Tai under a palm tree.” Such dreams sometimes get translated into a cruder form. In “My Friend's Garage,” the speaker's friend, to create space away from his wife who is having sex regularly with another man (as he is having sex with another woman), fixed up his garage “like a tiki bar,/ with palm tree posters and coconut ashtrays/ and bamboo grass along the workbench,” declaring, “A man's got to have a place he can fart.”

What is beauty, you may ask, in such a world? The word is mentioned mysteriously in “Black Fish” where, after describing the hill people who come to town “in their finery/ and smoke-soaked coats/ drinking, laughing ...” he quietly transitions to “while beauty appears/ and crosses the street/ to the Salvation Army/ in Morton on Saturday night.” More explicit answers can be found in a poem called “Beauty,” arranged in a gripping sequence of images that begin with “Beauty is the burned husk of an old house/ with a crime scene strip around it/ I pass each night on my way to you.” My favorite appearance of the word occurs in “The Voyagers” where, in the face of rampant dereliction, the poet looks on as “beauty pulls a curtain back/ or shows up in worn shoes next to the bed” (an image I associate with Van Gogh’s art).

In Cole's “Invisible Land” the speaker sits in a bar waiting and thinking, with a “need fire going in the heart/ while we ride the big winds/ through the deep black sea/ because I’m waiting for beauty/ to come through the door/ with that inextinguishable spark.”

This book bears reading again and again to discover as I did that Douglas Cole is not writing merely about losers and winners out there where real life is envisioned as garbage, where fantasy life is bland and bereft of meaning—he is writing about us in our own bleakness, reading and wondering, “what's next?”

Near the center of the book is a long poem “LA Days,” chock full of images from a man's late life reminiscing that ends with “and so I've come back to tell you/ about this dream I had/ about a man who goes into a theater/ to watch the movie of his life/ and all the way through he keeps saying,/ I remember that,/ or, that never happened,/ or…oh, man, I wish I could do that again.”

As I read, I began to hear in my own mind the echo of Willy Loman's wife Linda in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, crying out against her husband's apparent worthlessness: “I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” This collection of poems is Cole's way of paying attention, more like Harry Crews than Arthur Miller, but with quiet empathy and the added intensity of poetry.

At the end of this journey through the poems, I sit with the speaker in “The Consolation of Philosophy” and listen to his magnificent speech and say, “I got it!” (meaning my own variations of “it”) and understand and feel the blessing he leaves, there on the page, for me.
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--Barbara Knott

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Zbigniew Herbert once said, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” And yet the barometer is an essential tool for translating the pressure of the atmosphere to help us forecast what weather is headed our way. In The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God, Douglas Cole has provided readers with a precise collection of atmospheric readings for the weather systems of human relationships and struggles. The poems in the collection blow and rumble, rage and grow still. After finishing the collection I felt tousled and sunburnt and invigorated.

The lives Cole translates into verse in this collection feel genuine and known, and they are treated with a respect that never falls too easily into kindness. The voices that appear in the collection muddle through and suffer and find small moments of joy. The combination of clear realism and a sense of the mythic is surprising in many of the poems. There is an elevation of mundane experience that calls to mind Gary Snyder or Jim Harrison.

Cole has a great talent from dropping bluntly worded lines that snap the reader back to attention mid-poem and reshape the experience of reading.

“until a cop appears with his flashlight / shining our eyes, / saying get on out of here--”

That subtle addition of “on” in the officer’s words gives the reader a sense of who the man is behind the badge. This sort of clear observation of little details charges many of Cole’s poems with a realism that invites the reader in.

The unexpected internal and end rhymes that appear in many poems create rhythms and pattens that invite multiple readings. Cole’s lines work together like cloud formations, echoing and refroming one another through their interactions. In the sonnet “Outcast,” Cole’s attention to rhyme and meter is particularly strong. In the lines “or an insistent moonlit blade of crow / shadow paralyzing every nerve / eyes transfixed by a cockroach floor”, Cole uses conventions of the form to generate momentum without drawing unnecessary attention to the form itself. Throughout the collection, form and structure serve to lift up the poems with similar unobtrusive skill.

Working together, the poems in The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God create a full picture of a weather system of the downtrodden that reads as both portrait and elegy. These poems are not out to change the world, but to record with precision the movements and moods of people finding their way between sunlight and storm.

--Matt Daly

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There is much beauty to behold in Douglas Cole’s compulsively readable poetry collection The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God. As a whole, these poems leave the reader with the feeling of movement in depictions of gritty landscapes and the people whose dreams and failures inhabit them. These places are filled with memorable characters who the poet presents to the reader without judgment, and often with an open-eyed wonder. The reader winds up feeling like a witness and a friend.

In a poem entitled “Beauty”, beauty is described in varying levels of splendor and unexpected metaphor. It is “the burned husk of an old house/ with a crime scene strip around it/ I pass each night on my way to you.” In “Invisible Land” the speaker is at the only bar unaffected by the city’s power outage and describes the storm’s effects: “The last/ leaves were ripped to shreds./ This would about do it—/ all that gold and red would get/ washed right down the street—/back to gray and black for a while./ I wasn’t completely without responsibilities.” The juxtaposition of the landscape with the speaker’s state of mind is one more beautiful effect of Cole’s poetic skill.

Some poems deliver brutality with narrative simplicity as in the marvelously brave and vulnerable “Father and Son” where the speaker is forced to box the son of his father’s friend. Description here is factual, the emotions of the speaker come out in lines taut with anger: “I fought the big dumb kid,/ while dad’s friend hit a bottle with a knife/ to start and stop the rounds/...The big kid hit hard. I didn’t let on./ I could see my drunk father was proud/ that I was sticking it out”. The reader, at once horrified and filled with compassion, is there for this speaker.

Often the poems rely on line breaks in lieu of punctuation to create their perpetual energy. I found myself eager to move from poem to poem to find out what would happen to the next character. What scene —be it a bar, a market, a cafe, or a friend’s garage—would roll out towards me and include me in its tragic beauty? One such poem is striking in its inclusion of the reader. Called “The Cycle”, it describes the relentlessness of everyday existence: “we are sucked up/ through elevators/ ...we are worms/ eating the world/ the bed throws us/ into the room/ the room throws us/ into the yard/ the yard into the street…” By the end of the poem we are all “bidding farewell/ climbing for light.”

As we arrive at the last poem in the book, “The Consolation of Philosophy”, we are provided with a sort of benediction, soothing us despite our woes. Using the second person “you” voice, it consoles us with a summing up of an imperfect life so far, but ending with the prayerful: “bless you on your journey,/ bless you in your optimism,/ bless you, and god’s speed—” It’s a voice that could be talking to themselves, a family member, you, or me, and it’s a voice that will stay with me a long time, inspired by its beauty.

--By Jessica Purdy

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Douglas Cole is a poet that America needs right now. The country is having a loud argument with itself; so loud, you almost forget that the majority of Americans aren’t shouting at anyone, they’re just trying to get by. Cole writes poetry for this America - for the man who sits down in a reading room out of the rain who “knows someone’s coming / to try and kick him out, / so he lowers his head / and sets up for a siege”, people “watching the world die wishing it weren’t”, and the hanged man who consoles himself with the thought that “I’ll never regret again / I’ll never choose badly again / I’ll never wait in line again”.

I’m inclined to agree with the poet that “the only way to make it through all / this is music”, and the silent music of Cole’s words will stick with you. Lines like “Out the door the storm blows / the wicked and the lawn chairs” and “He’s never more alive / than when he’s stuck in traffic” dig a finger in your ribs to wake you up and remind you that if you close your ears, and open your eyes, you too can see The Gold Tooth in The Crooked Smile of God.

--JEA Wallace