Daybreak
A bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master. For more than four decades Claire Malroux has blazed a unique path in contemporary French poetry. She is influenced by such French poets as Mallarmé and Yves Bonnefoy, but her work also bears the mark, and this is unusual in France, of Anglophone poets like Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A prominent translator of poetry from English into French, Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by a day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux’s oeuvre, from her early lyric poems to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun—a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II—to new and uncollected poems, including an elegiac sequence written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Silvain. This bilingual edition includes the original French versions of each poem.— Google Books
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Contents Cover Biographical Notes Copyright and More Information Title Page Introduction Octet Before Winter from A LONG-GONE SUN Studded with plane-trees My childhood's house is The child prepares herself to cross the bridge In violet circles Cricket hunts are also in the evening My sister bursts into tears over arithmetic problems The smell of disinfectant grips your throat Stretched out on a bench Years later, after the war, my grandmother Huge purple flowers spring from black corollas Beauty comes from Spain What do we know about the somber hours How are the little ones, my grandmother asks Was the brilliant scenario just a ruse from BIRDS AND BISON In the Square Appointment in June Widower Demolition Trees of Flame Mourning a Love On the Use of the Absent Prehistoric The Weight of the Day Erosion Night Breeze Facelifts Gazebo Sea Window Gaudebo The Wordless Woman NEW POEMS 2008–2020 Evergreen Crossings Elegy for a Young Garden Damselfly The Shadow at Cabourg Grottoes from The Fires of Absence Intervals Doppelgänger Scenography Ballad for a Queen and a Nun Acknowledgments
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