During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world’s greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. • “Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention.”—Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review “One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry.”—Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet presents a selection of the most innovative poetry of modern France in readable and accurate English translations, including the work of the symbolists, the dadaists, and the surrealists, accompanied by their French originals. Original.

The late Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida).