Machine generated contents note: Ballad for a Queen and a Nun. Studded with plane-trees -- My childhood's house is -- The child prepares herself to cross the bridge -- In violet circles -- Cricket hunts are also in the evening -- My sister bursts into tears over arithmetic problems -- The smell of disinfectant grips your throat -- Stretched out on a bench -- Years later, after the war, my grandmother -- Huge purple flowers spring from black corollas -- Beauty comes from Spain -- What do we know about the somber hours -- How are the little ones, my grandmother asks -- Was the brilliant scenario just a ruse -- From BIRDS AND BISON -- In the Square -- Appointment in June -- Widower -- Demolition -- Trees of Flame -- Mourning a Love -- On the Use of the Absent -- Prehistoric -- The Weight of the Day -- Erosion -- Night Breeze -- Facelifts -- Gazebo -- Sea Window -- Gaudebo -- The Wordless Woman -- NEW POEMS 2008-2020 -- Evergreen -- Crossings -- Elegy for a Young Garden -- Damselfly -- The Shadow at Cabourg -- Grottoes -- From The Fires of Absence -- Intervals -- Doppelganger -- Scenography -- Ballad for a Queen and a Nun.
Summary:
"For over four decades Claire Malroux has forged a unique path in contemporary French poetry, informed by the French tradition, poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Mallarmé, and more unusually, by the Anglophone tradition, especially Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A preeminent translator of English poetry into French, Malroux claims as a signal event in her literary life her discovery in 1983 of Dickinson's poetry, which she describes as "an encounter with the uncanny" and the awakening of a "personal affinity." Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. In almost every poem there is a characteristic and unsettling amalgam of past and present that collapses distance and incarnates through metaphor. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux's oeuvre from her early lyric poems, to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun--a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II--to new and uncollected poems from two sequences of elegies written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Sylvain"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.