Background
Cole was born in Woking, Surrey, and was educated at Balham Secondary School in London.
Cole was born in Woking, Surrey, and was educated at Balham Secondary School in London.
He did military service in the Royal Air Force from 1955 to 1957. His subsequent career included 1958 employment with Reuters news agency in London, working as a reporter (1965-1970), as a senior editor (1974-1994) at the Central Office of Information, London. He was Northern Arts Fellow at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham University (1970-1972).
He published several collections of poems and four novels.
His 1968 poetry collection, Moonsearch, was a Book Society recommendation. In 2015, Shoestring Press published a festschrift celebrating his life, edited by John Lucas.
This included poems, a story, photographs, essays and Cole"s final, innovative sequence of 13 poems, Broken Sonnets, which are marked by the use of ellipses to suggest gaps of memory or words that are too painful to be given expression.
(A collection of poetry by the British poet and novelist.)