Name: The Invention of Influence
ISBN: 9780811221726

Peter Cole

A dazzling new book by a writer with "perhaps the most capacious command of the Jewish poetic tradition of any poet now writing in English"(Religion and Literature)

The Invention of Influence

Kirsten Adam

I picked this book at random from the "new arrivals shelf" at the library. As with all goodreads ratings, my rating more reflects my experience reading the book than its level of intellectual merit. 

On a strictly academic level, this collection of poems probably merits more of a 4 or 4.5 stars rating. The works are clearly well-researched and interestingly bridge an ancient style of writing with a modern one. If I was well-versed in the nuances of the structure and literary traditions of the poetry of Kabbalah, I'm sure I would have found the poems more fluid and enjoyable. Without such academic scaffolding, however, I found the poems inaccessible and wooden. There were stanzas and a few poems where I forgot the structure and actually became enveloped in the content, but most of the time the structure was a distracting, salient feature. The words often felt forced into, rather than leaping from, the lines.