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.
