Selected Poems - Philippe Jaccottet [antikvár]

Introduction Most readers approach contemporary French verse with trepidation, suspecting (often rightly) that what they are being asked to read will prove to be puzzling, gratuitous, angular, abstract, inflated and . doctrinaire, bearing little resemblance to poetry as it is understood in the rest of the world. (We have fewer difficulties with Móntale or Brodsky than with, say, Michaux or Deguy - who remain, for that reason, no more than names to most of us.) At the risk of making him seem more immediately graspable than he is, I think it's safe to say that prospective readers ofjaccottet need have no such fears. Unlike the closely interlocked cycles of his better known contemporary Yves Bonnefoy, which are hermetic and work according to a system, or the open-plan notations of André du Bouchet, Jaccottet's poems are recognizably circumstantial, and empirical in their relation to the 'real world'. Although not quite so straightforward as Simon Watson Taylor's phrase, 'an artlessly artful simplicity', might suggest, he is really quite accessible to the anglophone reader. Unlike many French poets, he is not greatly troubled by the disjunction between the signifying word and the thing signified. Language is a given, and suffices for his purposes - which may explain his acceptance in the English-speaking world, where so much recent French poetry ('la poésie illisible': 'unreadable poetry', as it's called) has been greeted with baffled incomprehension. There is even, I think (though he himself might be startled by the idea), something 'English' in his mode of perception, something about him of a latter-day Keats - whose 'Ode a l'automne' he quotes more than once in his prose works, and whose 'negative capability' he shares (a Geneva Protestant in origin, he is also not quite French in sensibility). To come closer to our own time, the sort of note he strikes is not unlike that of David Gascoyne's Poems igj8-42, works of mystical attention like 'A Wartime Dawn' and 'The Gravel-Pit Field' - or, at a later date, of Kathleen Raine's On a Deserted Shore, for which he has expressed admiradon. Significantly, he has attracted the interest of a number of English-language poets; though his direct influence is nowhere clearly discernible, except perhaps in W. S. Merwin's The Lice (1969), where several pieces strike the Jaccottet note exactly. Take 'The Room': I think all this is somewhere in myself The cold room unlit before dawn Conuining a stillness such as attends death And from a comer the sounds of a small bird trying From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark You would say it was dying it is immortal.