‘Kurgan is the work of a poet who has mastered the full range of his voice,’ commented [Trillium] English-language jurors Kim Echlin, Andrew Pyper and Michael Redhill. ‘It is a collection that seems at times easily elegant in its language, but that at the same time plumbs the depths of human experience.’
‘Most of all, it is Coles’s mastery of syntax, sinuous and unpredictable, that brings his poems alive. The trademark hesitations, asides and parentheses that mark his lines derive from speech (a Hemingway wife is ‘‘one of the specialty, I am/going to risk saying, dishes in the big man’s/moveable feast’’) and are all measured out and weighed in beautifully constructed sentences. They reflect, I will risk saying, a radical skepticism: ‘‘Nothing/here doubts itself, from which it follows/there is not a hint of me here,’’ he tells us. This doubt, perhaps Coles’s most modern trait, runs through and enriches all of Kurgan (as it did his great book-length poem Little Bird) and places his poetry among the very best being written in English.’