Beschreibung:
Gathered together by the translator as a companion volume to his edition of Rene Char s war-time journal, "Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance" (1943 44), the forty or so poems presented here are a representative cross-section of the poet s mature work. The opening poem comes from a chapbook published in 1936 and dedicated to the children of Spain; the last in date, from a small volume published posthumously in 1988. All three genres characteristic of Char s work are represented: poems in verse, poems in prose and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known, "maxima sententia" that combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus.