I have little to say about Guillevic’s The Sea & Other Poems (translated by Patricia Terry, introduction by Monique Chefdor, foreword by the poet’s daughter Lucie Albertini Guillevic) except: Buy it. Buy it now. This is a desert island book. I feel bound to quote from it, but nothing as brief as I have time for can do justice to Guillevic’s extended sequences in which menhirs, a canal, salt flats, and the sea speak. So let me instead quote two brief poems in the poet’s “own” voice, from his 1993 collection entitled Now:
When nothing is happening
And you are thinking
That nothing is happening,What is happening
Is that your are thinking
That nothing is happening,Which then has the weight
Of an event,In which time concentrates
On itself—Just as you are doing.
**
—What are you waiting for,
Standing at the window?
You seem all intent
On something outside.—I’m not waiting for anything.
I’m not observing anything.
I see without looking.—But I know that you are waiting.
Waiting for something,
Waiting to be invaded
By the now.
Most of Guillevic’s poems do this: I mean they make thought feel as substantial as images. When they are descriptive, they are descriptive in a way that makes the pictorial fall away like a snake’s old skin, and we feel as if we are witnessing consciousness itself in motion. And it shines….
The Perpetual Bird Rating:
Ah, Guillevic, c'est magnifique!<br /><br /><br />word verification: glike!
Nice to see his work getting translated!