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Throughout WWII, French poet Jean Follain wrote poems that revisit the provinces of personal and cultural history. His quietly phrased, brief devotions are -described as "miniatures," yet are monumental, capturing the pressure of history upon daily moments. By reducing the world to its small objects, every detail, every image becomes imbued with meaning.

This bilingual volume, celebrating the centennial of Jean Follain's birth, is translated by W.S. Merwin, who writes in his introduction: "Follain's concern is finally with the mystery of the present -- the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places, as they seem to be in the best of his poems."

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Read, Please
This is a work of words adrift in the materiality of their naming, and that world named, presented, standing somehow ahead of, or just beyond, the somehow bearable weight of its recent history.And it's lit up.So it's poignant, yet it is the poignancy of survival, of French and its speakers, as Merwin more or less puts it, weathering the shocks of encountering analogous languages (like English) and the wars' and technological/cultural changes' effacement of the faith in language's power to name, of a word's acquiring intimacy with things through a speaker's familiarity and love.In this book poems, and the worlds they name, are structured by the presentation of lit and resonant details which are held in imagination's vision and historical understanding the details prompt.If Pierre Reverday can recall DiChirico's inhuman isolation, abandoned space, Follain is the mammalian antidote, who, though no less strictly constructed, lightly inhabits his landscapes with intimacy and fondness.This is an absolutely lovely piece of work.Do yourself a favor and read it.

Must-have for Follain fans
I'm not always fond of Merwin's verse translations, but he's done a beautiful job on these.Every poem is solidly lineated.They sound as though they'd been written originally in English.The diction always feels right--neither too high nor too low.

If you've never read Follain's verse poems, this is the way to start.His poems manage to be both highly economic and evocative.They are rich and earthly, intellectually precise and "metaphysical" in the sense used by Eliot.

Poet and Translator: A Perfect Marriage
Fortunate we are that W.S. Merwin commits as much time to translating other poets from other countries and times as he commits to writing his own magnificent works.His gifts as a poet make him far more than a translator: Merwin finds the seed of intention of the poet's works he embraces and manages to lift the thoughts intact into the English language.

This very fine compilation of the poetry of Jean Follain has been gleaned from nine books of poems, curating the best of Follain's poems into a single heady volume.The poems are brief, address history and the effects of time passing with an economy of words that distill portions of moments into indelibly whispered thoughts.

OCTOBER THOUGHTS

'How one loves
this great wine
that one drinks all alone
when the evening illumines its coppered hills
not a hunter now
stalks the lowland game
the sisters of our friends
seem more beautiful
at the same time there is a threat of war
an insect pauses
then goes on.'

Read it several times and the atmosphere of World War II in the tremulous French countryside is palpable.And this is only one of many.Merwin allows us the pleasure of reading the poems in both French and English, a fine concept that Copper Canyon Press continues to pursue. A superb collaboration of poetic sharing. Grady Harp, December 06 ... Read more

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A selection of work by four of the fathers of prose poetry, the French writers Max Jacob, Jean Follain, and Francis Ponge. Baudelaire laid the foundations for prose poetry as a genre in the 19th century; these poets expanded the concept in the first half of the 20th century. Jacob (1876-1944) was a writer of surrealist cubist fables, Ponge (1899-1988) was a master of the language of things, and Follain (1903-1971) merged the everyday with the historical to create a world rich in anniversaries. ... Read more

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Modern Masters of the French Prose Poem
The prose poem is something of a French specialty. Edgar Allan Poe may have coined the term, but it was Poe's French translator Charles Baudelaire who first "dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhyme, supple and muscular," and became the first of many fine French poets to excel in this oxymoronic genre. "Dreaming the Miracle" brings together a sampling of the work of three masterful French prose poets of the 20th Century: the surrealist Max "the Nut" Jacob (1876-1944), the first great poet to apply dream logic to poetic composition; Francis Ponge (1899-1988), the "would-be encyclopedist" of the poetry of the ordinary object; and (one of the great finds of the last century) Jean Follain (1903-1971), an obscure judge who wrote exquisite vignettes that collectively comprise an intimate albeit anonymous autobiography of the last century.

The Jacob and Ponge translations seem a little uneven at times, but the poetry shines through nonetheless. The translations of Follain's prose poems, beautifully rendered by Mary Feeney and the late, great poet William Mathews, are an unadulterated delight. Since the publisher neglected to put any sample pages up on the Amazon website, let me rectify the omission by quoting a representative prose poem from each poet:


Max Jacob: The Beggar Woman of Naples

When I lived in Naples, there was a beggar woman at my palace gate I'd toss a coin to before getting into my carriage. One day, surprised that she never thanked me, I looked at her. As I did, I saw that what I'd mistaken for a beggar woman was a green wooden crate containing some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas.


Francis Ponge: The Pleasures of the Door

Kings do not touch doors.
They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently or brusquely one of those large familiar panels, then turning back to replace it--holding a door in one's arms.
The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles to a room by its porcelain node; that short clinch during which movement stops, the eye widens, and the whole body adjusts to its new surrounding.
With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it decisively and shutting oneself in--which the click of the tight but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.


Jean Follain: Untitled

Store windows start to light up: displays that banish thoughts of war or hunger, huge dolls with lifelike lashes, eyelids that close. A storefront with shining jewels catches your eye. A white wall takes on a greengage tint. A gutter along the sidewalk seems to be running with a red liqueur instead of dirty water. Absinthe green smoke floats up from muted roofs. There's a passerby who's never written a word except his signature, using a beat-up wooden holder. He senses this bursting beauty. And the man with a terrible temper, seeing his hand turned orange by the sunset, falls silent before his household who fear him, maybe even forgive him his fits. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A neglected masterpiece
Broken Film: Poems

D'Apres Tout: poems by Jean Follain translated by Heather McHugh is quite simply a desert island book for anyone who wants to know why literary minimalism has a purpose.Follain would probably be shocked to be linked with minimalists, but he likewise never sat well with the surrealists.Most minimalism succeeds or founders on an immediate but limited path of associative analogy, but the best minimalism opens outward into a depth that bespeaks of poetic compression at its peak of perfection.Follain creates entire social systems, worlds, and dramas in 10 to 20 lines.Comparisons might be drawn, in English, to Thomas Hardy or Phillip Larkin but these fall short of Follain's genius for making the inanimate and non-human realms become present as things to be reckoned with.Hardy and Larkin show us how people interact with such things, but Follain makes things present in an ontological sense that I have never experienced in any other poet's poetry.
I have read other translations of Follain (I read no French) but
McHugh's translation of this book is the only one that I have creased, treasured, and come back to time and time again over almost 30 years.

I hope that Princeton or another publisher will re-issue this absolutely essential book so that more poets could see what it can be like to be humble, chaste, and brilliant. ... Read more