The Curved Planks

“[Bonnefoy] is a poet of small epiphanies: some long-ago summer evening when the night forgot to fall while a lone child played on the road and a distant voice kept calling him.  This is the secret of his lyricism, the memory of a fragment of time touched by eternity that  he cannot let go.  Is this one obsession enough for a lifetime of poetry?  In a few of his finest poems, Bonnefoy makes us believe that it is.”—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

"Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime—more than half a century now, and still counting. These recent poems, superbly translated by Hoyt Rogers, attest to his enduring greatness."—Paul Auster
 
"Yves Bonnefoy represents contemporary French poetry at its classic best: sober and yet soaring, full of invocation and desire: 'Let this world endure . . . Let this world remain.' This volume—thanks to Hoyt Rogers, Richard Howard, and the input of Bonnefoy himself—is a splendid celebration of the depths of this particular craft, whose curved planks of its prow are shaped like a mind."—Mary Ann Caw, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, the Graduate School of the City University of New York
 
"I have been deeply impressed, reading Hoyt Rogers's translations of Yves Bonnefoy's Les planches courbes. They are much more than English versions of these strong and delicate originals—they are re-creations that became distinct poems in our language, a true and loving homage to their source."—Alastair Reid
 
"The Curved Planks is the crowning achievement of a major French poet who has much to say to our troubled times: Yves Bonnefoy continues to explore the possibilities of hope, to assay the significance of the here and now, to chronicle the dual 'presence' of emptiness and plenitude. Hoyt Rogers has composed fluent, engaging translations that reveal a profound respect for the original poems—and for the man who wrote them."—John Taylor, author of Paths to Contemporary French Literature
 
"The first poetic associations of Bonnefoy, an octogenarian French poet often mentioned in the same breath as Paul Valry, were with the French surrealists, but he has long since been a maverick of French verse, crafting stanzas as simple as they are resonant and rooted in everything from modernism to medieval song. This sequence, composed of short series of poems that take in every form from prose to rhyme, centers, as Richard Howard notes in a baroque preface, on renewal, taking the myth of Ceres as a point of origin: 'she still/ Stops at night / Under rustling trees, / And knocks at closed doors.' Hoyt—who provides a long afterword, a translator's note and a bibliography—offers a translation that is solid and clear, and that allows for play among word and phrase senses: 'the limitless space of clashing currents, of yawning abysses, of stars.'"—Publishers Weekly