Every Minute Is First
eBook - ePub

Every Minute Is First

Selected Late Poems

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Every Minute Is First

Selected Late Poems

About this book

The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French poet offers a penetrating and encompassing collection touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. "If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing, " she muses, "all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth." The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it's more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we're not merely waiting for it: "one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view."

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her "the body" is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart's lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.

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Yes, you can access Every Minute Is First by Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jody Gladding in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Milkweed Editions
Year
2024
eBook ISBN
9781639550913
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
Poetry
Index
Literature

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Preface
  6. Other
  7. In
  8. On the Brink of Life
  9. Yes, the Interval
  10. Earth
  11. Out of Scale
  12. Forward
  13. Falters, Wears Out
  14. Grass Between the Lips
  15. Alone
  16. This Dark Tree
  17. Red-Hot
  18. In the woods leaves
  19. If we speak in fables, it’s just
  20. After having followed the formidable path, I will be
  21. I hang my life
  22. What is this face
  23. What drives you
  24. Black the water
  25. The throat awakens full of dirt
  26. When evening comes
  27. Cut the round loaf, villager
  28. Hearing
  29. September, eleven o’clock in the morning, without you
  30. Replanting the hellebore
  31. I desire you in our time
  32. Worried about
  33. Twenty or thirty centuries ago
  34. It’s sad
  35. Scent of linden trees
  36. At day’s end things join up
  37. Under the curses of birds
  38. —What did you say? Lost empires
  39. Writing?
  40. Little breaths, the moments of our lives
  41. Our presence
  42. Our lungs breathe
  43. The decorum of words
  44. The patient in the recovery room
  45. The poor stone I’m holding
  46. Very dark matter
  47. At that time, to represent an absurdity or strong emotion
  48. Yes, heavy, the blood
  49. The mirror retains
  50. Into my spinal column
  51. To be traversed
  52. Tremble
  53. As for me, I inhabited a large bird
  54. How many trees in the course of this journey
  55. That trembling
  56. I’m endlessly obsessed with one desire
  57. Briefly
  58. Each thing according to
  59. On window panes, curtains, books, camp the invisible
  60. … At the border of the inexorable
  61. No, I will not swallow
  62. If I could seize a little nothing
  63. Yes, I sank
  64. I came back to life. Oh, monorail world, transport me
  65. Don’t descend
  66. There are bruised words
  67. Strange, the objects in certain categories
  68. You know what it means
  69. Can we
  70. Inhale the strong odor of the streets
  71. We don’t want
  72. Against my cheek
  73. “See you shortly, in the unknown”
  74. To the heights of incandescence
  75. When do you want to divorce yourself?
  76. When I think of you, I transform into tree-lined paths
  77. I don’t believe in heaven
  78. To approach a word
  79. Every minute is first, when the garden
  80. As though
  81. Return the love of the least things
  82. For the music of stones
  83. —And nevertheless I pressed against your face my own
  84. You’ve got a run in your peritoneum
  85. Sitting in the park
  86. Collect a seed
  87. We’re always holding the end of the world, no matter where
  88. A very ripe apricot gets smashed
  89. Pain: explosion, spasms
  90. What did you do, if not
  91. I’m writing a letter to I don’t know whom
  92. In my body there’s
  93. Holes in the bark
  94. Every morning I form
  95. Don’t wake me sleeper
  96. Small noise, rain
  97. Following the edge of an island
  98. … But so far off, so unrealized, the peace I’m seeking!
  99. New world?
  100. End-of-life accompanist
  101. It’s possible/impossible
  102. With your chagrin, you meant to stay alone
  103. It’s as if there were an earth above
  104. … But what if it were absurd, our turmoil?
  105. Sick
  106. Then a scene imposes itself upon you, impossibly banal: a man
  107. She doesn’t have a name
  108. How I searched for you, life
  109. Why this feeling of exile
  110. A very large white pigeon
  111. These are my “Sorrows” I’m writing
  112. So soft, the gray of the sky sometimes occupied by white
  113. Nevertheless love
  114. As if the earth
  115. In a little while, I will no longer be, you will no longer be
  116. Notes
  117. About the Author