Appeasements

‘That was yesterday / Those were my hands / That was yesterday / When the future came…’

Yves Nedonsel – born in Normandy in 1947 – was a poet of time and out of keeping with his time. His first book, Remugles, was published in 1974. He then fell silent for decades, turning his attention to the study of transhumance paths and the cultivation of a vineyard in his adopted home of Provence. Yet he continued to revise his poems and compose new ones, creating a body of work remarkable for its intensity, its feverish rhythms, and its grim humour.

In ‘Autopsy of a Week’, ‘Summerhill’, and ‘In Quarantine’, the speaker rails against the cant of the contemporary world, yet the language is electrified by the stuff of this world: ‘the future is shrink-wrapped’, and ‘the cheapjack shines / mesmerising to memorise…’ By turns profane and profound, Nedonsel’s poems give voice, as he himself writes, to ‘a voiceless cry torn to shreds by writing’.

Appeasements is the first selection of Nedonsel’s poems to appear in English. The book also includes a translator’s note about the poet and the poetry, as well as several of Nedonsel’s letters.

Alex Andriesse is a poet and has translated, notably, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (NYRB Classics).