Full Description
Shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize 2011.
The first English translation of this winner of the 1991 Max-Jacob Prize.
The Book of the Snow consists of 112 short poems inspired by a bleak and beautiful natural landscape, where the falling snow gives rise to a sequence of poems that are both lyrical and suffused with irony, allusion and paradox.
The Book of the Snow is Jacqmin's twelfth poetry collection and is translated by Philip Mosley.
François Jacqmin was born in 1929 in Belgium and spent his formative years in England during the Second World War, writing his first poems in English. His distinctive identity as a writer is inspired primarily by botany and metaphysics.
Philip Mosley is Professor of English, Communications, and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. As well as being a highly-regarded translator, he is author of books on Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Ingmar Bergman and Belgian cinema.
Contents
Series Editor's Note, Translator's Preface, Introduction. Snow, The time comes, To return, The landscape is fixed, When we follow, Gentlefolk, What you hear, Hounded by the night, I close my eyes, If we have, In poetry, We raise our eyes, For an inexhaustible instant, The cherries are packed tight, Night, The fog, You suspect, NuNo one gets by with his speech, The snow is everywhere, He who lives, Frozen in its icy crypt, It is midnight, My ruin, I am delighted, It is not the aptness, Night is old, All of a sudden, There has to be a handy slander, Who will make sense of, The role, Literary practice, Beautiful, Heads lowered, We understood that, There is nothing as pointless, What hope is there, The snow was going nowhere, The tendency, We begin a verse, When the snow stopped falling, By dint of, What lesson, The rectilinear distress, He who had a single clear thought, Sometimes, in the night, The fountain, Beneath the snow, Where the snow falls, Being detaches itself from the night, The small scenes, Moved, The boundless is sealed, The mast of nothingness, I no longer stand, Some use the sled,You suffer a little, He who listens, Nothing stifles me too, We await, I cross the enamel, It is not dying, There are men, I open the book, Being, That to which all is given, Night exploits, Nostalgia, Only the dimwitted seraphim, The only thing, We cannot carry on, Let us talk no more, In the clinking, A ferocious blast, We have gone beyond, The contradiction, We see nothing, A first snowfall, There comes an age, There is nothing left, The snow came close, The repose of firs, When I no longer saw anything, Perceptive is he, The forest's low wings, In the white clamour, Everything proven, Since silence, Evening draws in, I can no longer, The impossible, With the snow, We conjugate, What begins, IThere was no landmark, It is eloquent, Being tilts, There is neither forest nor thought, The moon has revealed, After it had snowed, There were several moments, I make myself scarce, The noise, NI am not an author, Cold consumed, Since the frost, JI have had to muster, I do not connect with the world anymore, It is not enough, Day's end, What would be that triumph, In early evening, Biographical Notes.
