For Gilles Ortlieb, the day’s ration is hard won. He takes the art of noticing to a new level, petrifying us with moments of bleakness and ushering us out of them through his humanity. He states things as they are, with exactitude, with authenticity, with humour, and his voice is compelling. Ortlieb is among the very best poets writing in France today, and this bi-lingual selection of his work will cement his growing reputation in the anglophone world.
’A poet of uprootedness and displacement, with a uniquely gentle and rueful wit.’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
’It is no disservice to Gilles Ortlieb not to place him among the "visionaries". Rather, he is possessed of an eye that can discern, within the thicket of the real, the unnoticed, which may be its accessory or its reject. For the unnoticed is also this: the thing we conceal from ourselves.’
JACQUES RÉDA
’Reading the poems of Gilles Ortlieb, one’s focus is never blurred. Rather, everything is extraordinarily distinct. One emerges with clearer vision, and with an increased interest in the world.’
JEAN-PIERRE LEMAIRE
Gilles Ortlieb was born in Morocco in 1953. He returned to France in the 1960s where he studied Classics at the Sorbonne, before switching to modern Greek. At this period he travelled widely in the Mediterranean, with a predilection for Greece. In 1986 he moved to Luxembourg, where for many years he worked in the translation service of the EU.
He has published over thirty books, ranging from collections of poems and notebooks to an account of Baudelaire in Belgium (Au Grand Miroir, 2005), two volumes of critical essays, and a prize-winning meditation on the post-industrial landscape of Lorraine, Tombeau des anges (2011). A prolific translator from modern Greek (Solomos, Cavafy, Valtinos), he is currently at work on a multi-volume translation of the diaries of George Seferis, to be published by Éditions le Bruit du temps.
Sean O'Brien's poetry has received numerous awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His most recent collection of poems, Embark, appeared in 2022, and his Collected Poems in 2012. His fiction includes the novels Once Again Assembled Here and Afterlife. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, and translator. His latest collection of poems is Blood Feather (Jonathan Cape, 2023). His first novel, The Last Hundred Days, appeared in 2011. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves (Cape, 2019), was followed by a personal account of the city of Oxford, Real Oxford (Seren, 2021). For Arc publications he has translated Hélène Dorion’s Seizing : Places (2012) and Europe in Poems: The Versopolis Anthology (2020). He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford, and a Fellow of Saint Anne’s College.
Stephen Romer is a poet, critic, editor and anthologist. His latest collections include Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2017) and a French bi-lingual collection Le fauteuil jaune (Le Bruit du temps, 2021). He has edited two anthologies of French poetry, Twentieth-century French Poems (Faber, 2002) and (with Jennie Feldman) Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets, 1938-2008 (Anvil Press, 2009). His anthology French Decadent Tales was published by Oxford World Classics in 2013. He is Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.
