Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

In Dupin we read an erotics, but an erotics as understated as it is violent - a tone special to the poet, subtle, as if you were writing philosophy through the body... Nothing is said or felt in excess of itself. Nothing is permitted a reach higher than the human. The very precariousness of living informs this deeply moving poetics, quiet and always at risk. What poetry protects us from is both silence and too much sight. Reciprocity: something about Dupin's poetry demands just that, and permits nothing else. His poetics works itself out in the embrasure of a window, with light hollowing out barely enough space in the dark for what we care about to be saved, just that. It is a poetics for our time, never overblown, never oversure, never overstated...Jacques Dupin's is, above all, a poetry and poetics of understatement. This is a poetry of qualification, not of absolutes. So we can hear it. -- Mary Ann Caws * Professor of French at City University of New York *

Jacques Dupin (1927-2012) was born in Privas in the Ardeche. Images of the harsh mineral nakedness of his native countryside run through the whole of his work and figure a fundamental existential nakedness. Dupin was an ascetic who liked the bare and the simple. His poetry is sad, wise and relentlessly honest. He speaks in our ear, as if at once close and far off, to tell us what we knew: `Neither passion nor possession'. He was a poet and art critic, and a formidable authority on the work of Miro and Giacometti. This edition of his prose poems and lyrics has been selected by Paul Auster from seven collections published between 1958 and 1982, culminating in his Songs of Rescue. It has an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, Professor of French at City University of New York. French-English bilingual edition.