“Cole brings us his discoveries and celebrations of the often lesser-known artists he has come upon in his wanderings. An outsider and a flâneur, he is a man of many interests and several strong compulsions — and he makes his way forward by following the flights of his restless sensibility.”
“One way to get at this sensibility — I don’t know that there is any best way — is by looking at the essay “Always Returning,” his anecdotal and deceptively casual recounting of that visit to Sebald’s grave. In just a few pages, we see Cole’s essayistic method and get some hint of his deeper preoccupations.
We know from his preceding essay, aptly titled “Poetry of the Disregarded,” that Cole owes a profound debt to the German exile, a debt less stylistic than temperamental. Sebald moved his melancholic prose sinuously from association to association. He caught the feeling of the world as experienced by the displaced, those cut off from their pasts. He also demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to get things — seen things — to disclose. Writes Cole: “he understood especially well the private life of objects. As he wrote […]: ‘Things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them.’” Reading the essays, we see that Cole is very much a writer in Sebald’s lineage.”
“After looking at the grave, Cole quotes again from Sebald, this time from The Rings of Saturn — two sentences which go to the core of his own view of things, not to mention the slyly encoded point of the essay:
Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?”
“This alert scavenging instinct is deployed across Cole’s wide spectrum of interests and it results, as noted, in an excitingly heterogeneous mix of topics. In his literary reflections he goes from James Baldwin and W. G. Sebald to Tomas Tranströmer, Derek Walcott, and André Aciman, but also includes South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić and Sri Lankan memoirist Sonali Deraniyagala. An independent catholicity of taste is obvious. His considerations of artists and photographers project that same impulse — that set of predilections — onto the visual and performative realm. Essays on Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, director Gregory Doran’s production of an African Julius Caesar, and Tasmanian composer Peter Sculthorpe nudge us off the more well-traveled paths. They make a case for reassessing the canon, not by argument but by example — by enlarging the field of consideration. This, I kept thinking, is how a truly cosmopolitan individual greets the world.”