The Contemporary Poetry of France by Michael Bishop (review)

B o o k R ev iew s ‘passage’ ” (p. 113). What we have here, clearly, is a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of one of the most protean and at the same time one of the most tower­ ing figures in twentieth-century arts and letters. R o b e r t W . G r e e n e SUNY, Albany Michael Bishop. T h e C o n t e m p o r a r y P o e t r y o f F r a n c e . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985. $19.95. (Distributor: Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, N .J.). Not only is The Contemporary Poetry o f France a much needed work, filling as it does a gap in our understanding of present-day poets, but it reveals Michael Bishop’s own talents, as explicator and writer. The poetic messages of André Frenaud, Eugène Guillevic, Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet, Denis Roche, Michel Deguy, Bernard Noël, Yves Bonnefoy are decanted and evaluated by Bishop in his own personal, lucid, and highly sensitized style. The Contemporary Poetry o f France is a joy to read—either at one sitting, or to take up as a kind of meditation—because of the knowledge it yields to the reader; because it is a feast for the senses and for the imagination; because of its keen insights, depth of thought, and the ever-continuous feeling world which it probes. Frenaud’s poetry, which has been illustrated by Miro, Ubac, Dubuffet, Léger, Masson, and Chillida, is, in Bishop’s words, “ vital and urgent, modern and tragic.” Replete with contradictions and paradoxes, his “ Epitaphe,” for example, a liminal poem in Les Rois Mages, discloses his reactions to the world’s unfolding, without deception—staring, observing, but never sentimentally; harshly, sometimes, and bitterly; laughing stridently. Frenaud attempts to demystify and depoetize, as he infers that the poetic creation in and of itself, may be futile in the face of death: “ une machine à faire du bruit/...m achine à capter ce silence/pour vous en mettre dans Poreille/à grands coups d’ailes inutiles.” Guillevic’s Du domaine, Etier, Autres, Trouées and other works, are concerned to a great extent with the “ intermediary role of ‘speech,’ of language in the self-world equations he continually computes.” From each element and instant, signs and signals emerge: per­ sonal, yet collective, embossed with their own logic and definition—yielding their being, openly and fully. In Gagner, Guillevic writes, “ Nous savons bien, tout vous fait signe et puis se rend.” Is poetry then an endless pulsation of signals? A continuous invention of world? Meticulously and lucidly, Bishop analyzes and explicates the poetry of Jacques Dupin: his fascination with the problematics of art and its salvational aspects; his underlying aesthetics and concentrated style in such works as Gravir, L ’Embrasure, Une apparence de soupira!- , his imaginative universe in his essays on Braque, Kandinsky, Malevich, Laurens, Tapiès, Miro, Giacometti. Jaccottet’s verse, with its “ delicate” and “ resilient” voice, as manifested in L ’Effraie, L ’Ignorant, Airs, Beauregard, and other works, sets out to demonstrate the inter­ connectedness between language and creation in its relationality to people. The dilemma of language and its inadequacies are “ plus flottants que les lueurs qui les avaient fait naître.” Essays on Roche, Deguy, Noël, Bonnefoy are equally revealing of the creative imagina­ tion of these poets—and of Bishop’s as well. The breadth and scope of The Contemporary Poetry o f France is enormous: the fruit of 14 years of meditation, thought, reading and rereading of the works of the eight poets Bishop probes and sounds out in his slim but monumental volume. One can only hope—and suggest—that Bishop, the critic, will soon be transformed by the wizardry of his own talent, into Bishop, the poet. B e ttin a L. Knapp H unter College and the Graduate Center, C U N Y Vol.XXVI, No. 3 103 ...