The Seagull Library of French Literature
The Anchor’s Long Chain
Yves Bonnefoy, Beverley Bie Brahic
List price £13.99
Product Details
- Format:
- Paperback / softback
- ISBN:
- 9781803092935
- Published:
- 07 Nov 2023
- Publisher:
- Seagull Books London Ltd
- Dimensions:
- 112 pages - 203 x 127 x 10mm
- Availability:
- Available
- Series:
- The Seagull Library of French Literature
Categories:
An experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets of his generation. Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor’s Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy’s earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical—but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life’s eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem’s meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy’s powerful, discursive poetry.
Translator's Acknowledgements The Disorder The Anchor's Long Chain (Ales Stenar) America Child's Play Child's Play The Long Name The Trees Mouth Agape The Painter Whose Name is the Snow The Divine Names Passerby, Do You Want To Know? Almost Nineteen Sonnets Tomb of L.-B. Alberti Tomb of Charles Baudelaire 'Facesti come quei che va di notte...' The Mocking of Ceres The Tree on Rue Descartes The Invention of the Flute with Seven Pipes Tomb of Giacomo Leopardi Mahler, the Song of the Earth Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé To the Author of 'The Night' San Giorgio Maggiore On Three Paintings by Poussin Ulysses Sails Past Ithaca San Biagio, at Montepulciano A God A Poet A Stone Tomb of Paul Verlaine One of Wordsworth's Childhood Memories Remarks on the Horizon On Leaving the Garden: A Variation Another Variation
Yves Bonnefoy is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus of comparative poetics at the Collège de France. In addition to poetry and literary criticism, he has published numerous works of art history and translated into French several of Shakespeare’s plays. Beverley Bie Brahic is an award-winning poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and Stanford, California.