Pierre Reverdy (NYRB Poets)
Description
The great Pierre Reverdy, comrade to Picasso and Braque, peer and contemporary of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, is among the most mysteriously satisfying of twentieth-century poets, his poems an uncanny mixture of the simple and the sublime. Reverdy’s poetry has exerted a special attraction on American poets, from Kenneth Rexroth to John Ashbery, and this new selection, featuring the work of fourteen distinguished translators, most of it appearing here for the first time, documents that ongoing relationship while offering readers the essential work of an extraordinary writer.
Translated from the French by:
John Ashbery
Dan Bellm
Mary Ann Caws
Lydia Davis
Marilyn Hacker
Richard Howard
Geoffrey O’Brien
Frank O’Hara
Ron Padgett
Mark Polizzotti
Kenneth Rexroth
Richard Sieburth
Patricia Terry
Rosanna Warren
Praise for Pierre Reverdy (NYRB Poets)
“The great Pierre Reverdy, comrade to Picasso and Braque, peer and contemporary of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, is among the most mysteriously satisfying of twentieth-century poets, his poems an uncanny mixture of the simple and the sublime.” —The Poetry Foundation
“Pierre Reverdy is among the greatest of modern French poets, and certainly among the most elusive. His work is at once impersonal and intimate, crystalline and opaque, simple to the point of austerity. The landscape of his poetry is both instantly recognizable and, devoid of local specificity, imbued with an otherworldly strangeness. He is ‘a secret poet for secret readers,’ as Octavio Paz once described him, insisting on the necessity of parsing the silence, the empty spaces between what seems visible in the lines of his poems. Each feels like a fragment of a universe, and yet whole.” —Mary Ann Caws on Pierre Reverdy for Poetry Society of America
"A poem by Reverdy is a spiritual fact: everything that makes up the human being--sensations, feelings, other men and women--has been passed through the filter of poetry." —Octavio Paz
“Reverdy, with Paul Eluard...is the purest of the writers of his time.” —Philippe Soupault