Summoned: Poem 1977-1982

by Guillevic

Overview

The sixteenth of the twenty-five major works of Guillevic published by Gallimard since 1942, Summoned (Requis) represents a pivotal moment in his oeuvre and reaffirms his position as an essential and compelling voice in contemporary poetry. A long poem composed of short, lapidary verse that the poet calls quanta, each in itself a miniature poem, Requis distils familiar themes and motifs of the Guillevician universe within an expanded vision encompassing the outer reaches of space. Within this poetic hurly burly at once totalising and fragmented, arboreal and rhizomatic, cadenced and discontinuous, expansive and condensed, there is a summons to bear witness to the human condition while heeding the injunction of ‘notre toucher/De l’illimité’ that seeks to transgress the boundaries of knowledge, to abolish the dichotomies of presence and absence, motion and stillness, word and silence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602355255
Publisher:	Parlor Press, LLC
Publication date:	08/01/2015
Series:	Free Verse Editions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	424
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Eugène Guillevic (1907–1997) was one of France’s leading poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Guillevic, as he preferred to be known, published more than 35 collections of poetry in his lifetime. Monique Chefdor, formerly professor of French and Comparative Literature at Scripps College, Claremont University Center, California, and Maître de Conférences in Comparative Literature at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, France, has published extensively on 20th century French literature, notably on Cendrars, Proust, Segalen, Guillevic and the relationship between painters and writers. Stella Harvey is the author of a monograph Myth and the Sacred in the Poetry of Guillevic (Amsterdam-Atlanta:Rodopi, 1997) and has published a number of articles on Guillevic, the most recent of which appear in Guillevic maintenant (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011) and Notes Guillevic Notes (Vol. I , Fall/Automne, 2011). Lucie Albertini Guillevic, the poet’s widow, is a writer and translator. Her collaborations as a translator have introduced to major French publishers (Maurice Nadeau, Gallimard, Actes Sud, Arfuyen) some forty Swedish and Finnish writers, including August Strindberg, Stig Dagerman, Ingmar Bergman, Bo Carpelan, Lars Gustafsson, Edith Södergran,Tua Forsström, Lars Norèn, Paavo Haavikko, and Pentti Holappa.